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China Vows to Reduce Incidence of Congenital Diseases Among New-borns
Authoritative experts disclosed Wednesday that China will kick off a state plan, which aims to reduce the incidence of congenital diseases among new-borns across the country, in the first half of the year.
The program will be carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) and international practice in preventing deficiency among new-borns, said Ma Xu, deputy director of the science and technology institute affiliated with the State Family Planning Commission.
Ma, one of the drafters of the state program for prevention of congenital anomalies, said that this means that the world's largest eugenic project is going to start up.
Latest statistics show that four percent to six percent of around 20 million babies born each year in China suffer from at least one of more than 100 kinds of congenital deficiency, including bifid spine and intellectual abnormalities.
As a result of China's family planning policy which encourages each couple to have only one child, it has become a strong desire of Chinese families to have a healthy baby.
The WTO stresses that prevention of congenital anomalies is an important part of the efforts to guarantee the basic health right of human beings. The WTO calls for all nations to make their mother and baby health plans centering on this issue.
Ma Xu said that the new plan is expected to help reduce the incidence of congenital diseases among China's new-borns by 20 percent to 30 percent within five years.
He noted that China will take three steps to implement the huge program: measures such as vaccinations and taking nutriments will be encouraged before pregnancy; using gene chips and other advanced technologies to detect some major congenital diseases during pregnancy and taking effective cures to treat possible diseases; and after the child-birth, remedial measures such as feeding the new-borns with enzymes to prevent or ease possible congenital diseases.
China will make good use of its existing enormous family planning service network to carry out the new program, Ma said, adding the country's more than 400,000 professional service staff involved in family planning and medical workers to participate in the work.
Xinhua learned that pilot experiments of the huge program have been carried out in southwest China's Guizhou Province and China's Special Economic Zone Shenzhen city, in south China's Guangdong Province, for more than one year and have produced encouraging results.
Currently, China's family planning policy, adopted three decades ago, is shifting its focus from controlling the size of the population to improving the quality of the population.
The quality of the population has become an increasingly important factor which has key impact on socio-economic development, experts pointed out.
They said, China's successful experience in realizing the "low birth rate, low mortality and low growth rate" of its population will lay a good foundation for the country to carry out its enormous eugenic program. In addition, they noted, China can learn a lot from international practices in this regard.
At the same time, the comparatively sophisticated gene chip technology will constitute strong technical support for the program.
Currently, a company based in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, has developed a gene chip medical apparatus and has won state authentication. This technique can speedily diagnose a number of diseases at one time and at a low cost.
The first China Reproductive Health High-tech Expo has been slated for July this year as a complementary event to the launching of the nation-wide congenital diseases prevention program.
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