**Author details**

Edlyne Eze Anugwom Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

\*Address all correspondence to: akommiri@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

*Public Health in Developing Countries - Challenges and Opportunities*

within the context of formal health provisioning in the continent.

Africans living with HIV, such treatment remains out of reach" ([9] p. 4).

ready impediments to effective health delivery.

for instance, are seen as critical role players in health delivery and choice people make with regard to health [6–8]. While these private and informal sectors and their roles have been well-studied and even targeted in the guise of public private partnership in health, there is still an overwhelming number of things that happen in these sectors that are neither formally recognized nor regulated. In other words, there is need for not only the formal recognition of these sectors but crucially how synergies can be built to harness what is good in these sectors and expunge what is bad or counterproductive. A big selling point of these alternative health sectors is perhaps their affordability and easy access to a great majority of the people. Therefore, we need to begin conceptualizing public health systems that build also on the good aspects of the private and informal sectors and which also seek to recreate their general appeal

The three biggest infectious diseases in Africa from both prevalence and resources committed are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. These are the three giants of public health interventions and efforts in the continent. However, there have been new challenges especially in the form of new and periodic diseases like Ebola which has emerged in the last decade as a major public health concern in some African countries. As has been aptly summarized, "nowhere are global public health challenges more acute than in Sub-Saharan Africa. With just 13 percent of the world population, the region carries 24 percent of the global burden of disease" ([9] p. 1). Even though, globally and continentally, good strides have been made in curtailing the ravages of HIV, there is still a huge disease burden arising from it especially in Africa. Thus, "antiretroviral treatment is being provided to many of those in need in Africa, in numbers greater than was thought possible at the beginning of the decade. Nonetheless, for most

The above indicates that in spite of the recent improvements made in curtailing both the spread of HIV/AIDS and the mortality from it, there is still much work to be done in the public health system especially in sustaining the progress made and in scaling up general response. Incidentally, apart from donor/international support, there is a need for committed leadership, good governance, and policies backed by reasonable internal funding in African countries especially those heavily affected in terms of the disease burden. The situation is a little better in India, but acute population growth and dearth of potable water have meant that India confronts a fragile public health situation. Therefore, the need for concerted efforts as well as dynamic and proactive measures against diseases and afflictions cannot be overemphasized. Without doubt, the most current global public health scourge in the form of the corona virus which caught the whole world by surprise underlines the need for robust public health systems. The fact that such developed nations of the world as the USA, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, etc. could be caught napping and severely devastated as a result by the new virus with origins in Wuhan, China, calls attention to the inescapable fact that public health delivery and the institutions involved in it are by nature dynamic and confront ever-changing and mutative human environments. That health systems in the developed nations of the world that are well-developed and heavily-resourced could be severely eroded by the corona virus simply underlines the huge challenges of public health in the developing parts of the world, where both structural and environmental forces function as

There is therefore a need to interrogate prevailing health systems and health delivery in these parts of the world in relation to what appears to be a cyclic incapacity of public health. Perhaps, the contention of Kaseje that "the health system is neither robust nor flexible enough to respond to emerging scenarios that lead to reversal of gains. Traditional, faith, and other informal sources of care are used more because they are more available, accessible, affordable, and acceptable yet

**6**
