Shuji Kuroki writes:

There are many problems about social Medicine worldwide. Since 40 percent of the world's 51 million deaths last year were caused by communicable diseases, this is one of the most serious problems. AIDS is one of the communicable diseases whose sufferers cannot get well by current medical techniques. The problem is how people are infected with HIV. Now over 13 million adults, mainly heterosexual men and women, are infected through unsafe sex, contaminated needles used for taking drugs intravenously, or infection at birth when a mother's HIV is passed on to her child. We can stop people being infected with HIV. But disorders of lifestyle make this close to impossible. Many people know what AIDS is. But some 6000 people become infected each day.

Diabetes is another problem linked to eating too much of the wrong kind of food, a growing problem especially in developed countries like Japan. In contrast, in this respect Africa and Latin America might not seem related to Japan, because people in these regions suffer from not having enough to eat. We Japanese can eat more than enough delicious and nourishing food every day and many of us do not do enough exercise. As part of the developed world, Japanese will be among the more than 100 million people who will suffer from diabetes by the end of this century. Meanwhile, we people who live in the developed world cannot understand the suffering from hunger in Africa and Latin America, in spite of or because of our good life.

How should we think about these problem. I think that the Japanese medical community should study more and more. It is said that the Japanese medical community is far behind America's because of our small budgets. That is true I think. The American medical community is eager to study the newest research areas like AIDS. Japan must study the newest areas of research more and more, and I hope that AIDS vanish. Likewise, diabetes has been studied all over the world for a long time. And we know the cause of diabetes is mostly from lifestyle habits. The best way to improve your health is to change lifestyle habits. But if you develop diseases like diabetes or AIDS, you will have to manage the disease for the rest of your life. So each of us individually must be a wise, robust and reliable man or woman to lead others. So the Japanese medical community must foster young doctors of noble and reliable character and we must educate ourselves with the latest medical techniques. We must attain the ideal of being that wise man or woman.

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