Iraq

This Middle Eastern country, located across the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, was formed after World War I, and officially gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire on October 1, 1919, and from Britain on October 3, 1932. It has a population of 25,375,000 (2004) and has 55 doctors and 236 nurses per 100,000 people.

There are descriptions of medical procedures on cuneiform tablets from Babylon, dating from about 2000 b.c.e., and Babylon and later Assyria were centers of great learning. In medieval times, the great Arab surgeon Avicenna (980–1037 C.E.), author of Canon of Medicine, was born in Baghdad, which was the center of medical research in the region until 1258 when it was sacked by the Mongols. In 1401, it was again sacked by Tamurlane, and then ruled by the Ottoman Turks, with the city going into decline. In 1920, the Iraqi Medical Society was formed, but it was not until after World War II that the city boomed, with the wealth created from the sale of oil.

Much of the teaching of medicine took place at the University of Baghdad which published the Journal of the Faculty of Medicine each quarter, and also the Journal of the College of Dentistry. The Mosul branch of the University of Baghdad was founded as a separate university in 1967, and it also has a College of Medicine. The University of Basrah, founded in 1964, has a Faculty of Medicine, and al-Nahrain University (formerly Saddam University), founded in 1993, has a College of Medicine.

The rise to power of the Baath Party in Iraq in 1968 coincided with a period of great wealth for the country, and it was not long before the healthcare system became one of the best in the region. In 1976, the Iraq Cancer Registry was established, being one of the first to be formed in the region. However, the start of the Iran–Iraq War led to a decline in spending on medical care, and the continued rule of Saddam Hussein caused some highly-trained medical personnel to leave Iraq and settle in the West. By 1983, the area around Baghdad known as the Baghdad Governorate, which included about 29 percent of the population, had 37 percent of the hospital beds, 42 percent of the government clinics and 28 percent of the paramedical personnel. This demonstrated that although the focus of the healthcare system was on the capital, as it is in most other countries, the distant parts of the country were not totally neglected.

The health problems faced in Iraq until the 1940s were largely to do with poor sanitation and lack of access to fresh water. With the pollution of irrigation canals by both humans and animals, cholera, typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis were common, along with [Page 948]trachoma, influenza, measles, and whooping cough. The prevalence of all of these was massively reduced during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. By the 1980s with the decrease in expenditure on medical care, there was a rise in many of these diseases, especially in rural areas. This was exacerbated by the international sanctions imposed on the country after the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. There have also been problems concerning a large rise in cancer cases which many commentators have associated with the use, by the U.S. military in Desert Storm in 1991, of depleted uranium. The Iraqi government raised this issue, going as far as issuing a postage stamp in 2001 showing two badly scarred children with the caption “DU bombing crime against Iraqi people.”

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