China now faces three major challenges in building the health systems, Gao Qiang, executive vice health minister, said Monday at an annual meeting of the Ministry of Public Health.

"Its response network to possible health emergencies is still not very tight," Gao acknowledged. China is frequented by epidemic outbreaks, mass food poisoning incidents and serious traffic and natural disasters on vast territory with a huge population.

He said the situation has changed greatly in recent two years since the central government departments at various levels began to pay more attention to the building of public health systems and risk response mechanism.

"But we still have numerous weak points in view of our work style, team work, mechanism and financial input... Those points result in even weaker links in medical care at local levels," he added.

Noting that the second challenge lies in the threat of the spread of killer diseases, Gao said "HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis and hepatitis are far from being contained in his country with high prevalent rate and huge number of patients."

Meanwhile, he said chronic non-communicable diseases including sarcomata, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes are posing risks to the health of people.

The Chinese vice health minister referred the third challenge to lower accessibility to health services. "Nearly 48.9 percent of Chinese people cannot afford to see doctors when they fall ill and29.6 percent are not hospitalized whenever they should be," Gao said, quoting a survey outcome released last month by the Ministry of Health.

He ascribed the problems to five reasons, including China's lack of medical resources, imbalance distribution of the resources, low coverage of Medicare system, fast rise of medical costs, and inadequate government input.

China has 22 percent of the world's total population with only two percent of world's medical resources. "Among those resources, 80 percent of them are in cities and only 20 percent in rural areas," Gao said. "The imbalance of resource distribution makes it ever harder for rural residents to access needed medical care."

In addition, Gao said approximately 44.8 percent of the urban population and nearly 80 percent of rural population in China don't have any type of medical insurance. "Most of them are paying medical bills by themselves, bearing from physical, mental and economic burdens."

To make the situation even worse, China's medical fees has risen drastically over recent years. Survey also showed that the outpatient service and inpatient service in the country increase 13 percent and 11 percent on average compared with the charges eight years ago.

To improve the situation, Gao promised his ministry will target at the rural areas in 2005 and expand Medicare system to cover more rural residents.

Meanwhile, he said, the ministry will reform the present medical services in cities and explore for an appropriate service and management system in line with the country's socialist market economy, so as to "provide quality, convenient basic medical services at reasonable prices".

(Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2005)