Infectious morbidity and health services

Abstract

Argentina has a problem with infectious diseases which does not move back and, in some cases, it has worsened the incidence rate in the first five years of this decade. In spite of the country’s recent economic growth, there is no relation between income improvement and population’s health improvement. At the same time, health care services locate in the areas with higher relative wealth, urbanization, formal employment and solvent demand. The biggest problems of infectious morbidity are not found in these locations. Geographic distribution shows that the number of physicians grows when the individual wealth per inhabitant does. Public facilities without hospitalization are lower in relation to the amount of inhabitants throughout the country. On the other hand, there are more public facilities with hospitalization of smaller size and with fewer beds. In this context, infant mortality improvement and the slight non significant maternal mortality reduction in the years of economic revival suggest that, still, the majority of preventable deaths are due to social inequality in the country. The recorded events show Argentina as a country that does not change its infectious morbidity problems, with a private sector that pursues commercial logic and a public sector oriented towards a centralized hospital model with different scales for self-management. It is not seen then, a dynamic sector morphology that integrates a health care model based on health promotion and disease prevention on the basis of primary health care.