South Korea - Public Health and Safety

Public Health and Safety

Main article: Health in South Korea

Although life expectancy has increased significantly since 1950, South Korea faces a number of important health-care issues. Foremost is the impact of environmental pollution on an increasingly urbanized population. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, chronic diseases account for the majority of diseases in South Korea, a condition exacerbated by the health care system's focus on treatment rather than prevention. The incidence of chronic disease in South Korea hovers around 24 percent. Approximately 33 percent of all adults smoke. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) rate of prevalence at the end of 2003 was less than 0.1 percent. In 2001 central government expenditures on health care accounted for about 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The suicide rate in the nation was 26 per 100,000 in 2008, the highest in the industrialized world.

Young South Korean males were found to be the tallest in all of East Asia, resulting from healthy living conditions, economic development and changes in food culture.

Based on the Asia-Pacific Advisory Committee on Influenza (APACI), South Korea ranked the highest of influenza vaccination in Asia with 311 vaccines per 1,000 people.

Read more about this topic:  South Korea

Famous quotes containing the words public, health and/or safety:

    “The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorise the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.”
    —Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)

    “O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
    How can you be alive you growths of spring?
    How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
    Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
    Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.”
    —Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)