BEIJING, April 9 (AFP) - China faces a serious shortage of qualified doctors and other medical workers, Vice Minister Gao Qiang has warned, state media said Friday.
Inadequate funding, infrastructure and governmental attention were also to blame, Gao said at a national health conference Thursday, noting the biggest problem was the shortages in rural areas.
"We must greatly strengthen talent-building in the various health fields," he told the conference, according to the China Daily.
Without qualified people, investments in public health, advanced equipment and other improvements will mean nothing, Gao said.
"In many disease control centres at the county level I have visited, about 90 percent of the staff are not professional workers," he was quoted by China Daily as saying.
Official figures show that rural areas, with 70 percent of the population, have less than 30 percent of medical resources.
The shortages are also affecting the effectiveness of China's recently-launched AIDS treatment program, which offers free anti-retroviral drugs to farmers infected with HIV from selling blood in government-backed schemes from the mid-1980s.
Most of the people administering the complicated drugs to AIDS patients are village doctors who have little knowledge of anti-AIDS treatment, said Gui Xien, a renowned HIV/AIDS expert who first discovered the epidemic caused by unsanitary blood selling in central China's Henan province.
International and Chinese experts have told AFP the lack of qualified professionals was contributing to a high dropout rate of 20 percent in the program which currently provides treatment to several thousand people.
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