Salomao lives in a shantytown that surrounds the city of Lubango in Angola, southern Africa from where I’m writing at this moment. Salomao’s family is in crisis. His youngest child Elena, three-years old, started vomiting and passing bloody diarrhea. Her two older siblings began shivering from high fever. Salomao’s wife, disfigured and disabled from polio, attempted to get next to and comfort them by sliding her body across the dirt floor of their one-room, tin roof house.
Salomao, desperate to find treatment for his children, entered the dense neighborhood of shoddy-built homes, separated by footpaths and streams of tainted water. Salomao went first to the pharmacy, but was turned away. Caring for his sick kids, Salomao has not worked in five days and had no money to purchase medicine. He next stoped at the local dispensary, but found it boarded up. Salomao, empty handed, reentered his congested community, passing neighbors who described with alarm how fever and diarrhea are spreading among their children, too.
Worldwide the number of urban poor, like the Salomao family, is increasing steadily. Later in the day, Salomao arrived at the Lubango Evangelical Medical Center – an INMED Training Site – where little Elena and her siblings were treated successfully. But stopping acute disease alone is never sufficient.
An effective, widely accepted strategy for improving urban public health includes efforts to increase literacy and general education, provide jobs and economic growth, and the most effective interventions to promote health and prevent death and disability. Relief from disease among the urban poor like Salomao will require comprehensive, sustained improvements like these.