Telemedicine and health information technology to achieve millennium development goals.

摘要

The United Nations set forward ambitious goals at the beginning of this new millennium to improve life for humankind in eight universally acclaimed objectives to be realized by 2015. The world was perhaps a little too ambitious in starting a new epoch, and the relief of having dodged the cyberbullet of a Y2K computer meltdown had left us all with a little exuberance and perhaps a lot of hubris. Then we had 9/11, the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti, desultory wars without resolution, more terror, the Iceland volcano and daily images of our essential vulnerability to natural disaster, and lack of resolve to adjudicate and resolve those disasters authored by our fellow beings. Maybe we just experienced the dreaded donor exhaust after so much trouble that the prospect of ending poverty and rearing healthy children faded away somehow. Then the financial crisis of 2008 further distracted the world from even the noblest goals of mutual assistance and doing the right thing. At any rate at this interval, full achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2010 seems a distant dream.