I think we can all agree that Africa is a continant that has to deal with a lot of problems. Africa is the world's poorest inhabited continent. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 25 ranked nations were all African nations. This poverty has widespread effects, including lower life expentancy, violence, and instability, factors intertwined with the continent's poverty. On top of that, they have to deal with genocide and areas that still have slavery. Many diseases effect the continent, including AIDS and most of the countrys deal with their people being undernourishment.
But Africa has to deal with a new problem: Obesity.
More than one-third of African women and a quarter of African men are estimated to be overweight, and the World Health Organization predicts that will rise to 41 percent and 30 percent respectively in the next 10 years. In South Africa, one of the wealtier countries, some 56 percent of South African women are now either obese or overweight, compared to fewer than 10 percent who are underweight.
Although the figures are lower than in affluent countries, many experts fear that health systems already stretched by the AIDS virus, malaria and poverty-related diseases may snap under the additional burden of heart diesase, strokes, cancer and diabetes, conditions linked to obesity.
Worldwide, an estimated 1 billion people are overweight, compared to 800 million who are undernourished.
Only about 2 percent of Africans suffer from diabetes, compared with nearly 8 percent in Europe and North America. But the International Diabetes Federation says Africa's overburdened health systems are ill-equipped to diagnose the disease, and treatment is too expensive most of its victims.
The federation cites the example of a diabetes patient in Bamako, the capital of the desert country of Mali, needing to spend more than $21 on diabetes care a month _ more than half the average family's income.
Poor communities with no electricity or refrigerators face the added problem of how to store insulin. Even in relatively sophisticated cities like Cape Town, the number of diabetes sufferers with amputated feet due to late diagnosis and poor treatment is distressingly high.
"It's not true that only the rich have problems with obesity and overweight," says Jean-Claude Mbanya, director of Cameroon's National Obesity Center.
"The poor suffer even more."
Source:AP
Does anyone have anything nice to say about Africa? Honestly, they are starving, overweight, unstable and prone to genocide and epidemics. Just once I want to hear a positive story about Africa that isn't about a poor African escaping through extraordinary circumstances to the west. The only good things we hear about are people getting out of Africa.
I am not blaming you, or anyone, for reporting these things, but I just want to hear something positive.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
Okay, I'll write something positive.
Here is something positive. I spent a year working on a project, of which I can't give detail for security reasons, but I was in the most beautiful places in the world. Zanzibar has two half of the island, the tourist area and the indiginous area. My station was in the indiginous are. I lived there with my interpreter and found their way of life so amazing. Their main food staple, being an island, is fish. I would always go get my fish every day at the fis market. Wonderful fresh fish. And the beautiful Aquamarine water, you could walk out for atleast a quarter mile and not go above you waist.
Zanzibar, the indiginous side, was very poor, but they were the most happy, loving, caring, inviting people I have ever known.