US offers to help China with rural medical woes

BEIJING, Dec 13 (Reuters) The United States is ready to help China tackle its rural health care problems and better integrate traditional with Western medicine, US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said today.

Leavitt, wrapping up a week-long visit, said he had been impressed with China's commitment to fight infectious diseases such as bird flu and AIDS, but that transparency remained a talking point.

''It's very clear to me from my conversations from the village level all the way to the health ministry that China takes infectious disease seriously,'' Leavitt told a news conference in Beijing.

''I think it's safe to say that following their experience with SARS that they became highly focused on the collection of information and in the dissemination of public information necessary to combat them early and aggressively.'' China initially covered up the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that emerged in the south of the country in 2002 and spread globally in 2003, infecting 8,000 people and killing 800.

''We have an on-going dialogue about the importance of cooperation and transparency. That has been a recurrent theme and it will continue to be,'' he said.

But China's health system faces other challenges, notably in the vast countryside, home to some 800 million people, many of whom have only limited access to doctors and no insurance.

''They know where their system needs help and to the extent that we have any capacity to add to their thoughts on this, we will. It's not an area we have perfected either,'' Leavitt said.

''They're developing an insurance system in rural China.

I'll have advice for them on that based on lessons we have learned, some of them successes and some of them learning from our failures,'' he added.

The growing popularity of complimentary treatments, such as traditional Chinese medicine, was another area the United States hoped to cooperate with China, Leavitt said.

''The Chinese clearly view their traditional Chinese medicine as providing benefit and they want to know how to integrate it better with Western medicine. There's clearly in my mind something to be learned from their experience,'' he said.

''I do think it's a dialogue we ought to engage in.'' REUTERS LL DS1132