1. Life expectancy: 74.8 years for females; 71.1 years for males.
2. Infant mortally rate: 22 per 1,000 births.
3. The food and health standards are generally below those of European or North American countries. Dysentery, hepatitis, stomach parasites and malaria occur in China. Diseases like tuberculosis and measles that were once thought to have been tamed have returned.
4. Chinese between the ages of 35 and 64 are twice as likely as Americans to die of heart disease. One in five Chinese have high blood pressure. Many blame the trend on more fat- and sugar-laden Westernized diet and fast food which causes obesity and made it more likely for people to have high blood pressure and heart disease.
5. The Harvard School of Public Health has estimated that 65 million people will die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 18 million will die from lung cancer between 2003 and 2033 from smoking and burning fuel indoors with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease accounting for around 19 percent of all deaths and hung cancer, 5 percent.
6. Gastrointestinal cancer is now the number one killer in the countryside. It is estimated that nearly two thirds of China’s rural population—more than 500 million people—use water contaminated by human and industrial waste.
7. About 250 million Chinese are considered overweight and 90 million (about 7 percent of the population) are obese (2006). The number of obese tripled as the economy grew sevenfold between 1992 and 2006.
8. In the mid 2000s, 24 million Chinese suffered from malnutrition. As many as a third of the children in Guizhou and a forth of the children Guangxi are underdeveloped physically.
9. China is home to the world’s largest disabled population. The are 83 million disabled people in China, with a million in Beijing alone. In the 1990s, 60 percent are illiterate, 40 percent are unemployed and nearly half can not find spouses. There are only 250 schools for handicapped children with a total enrollment of only 100,000 students. There are 4.2 million children disabled by congenital diseases alone
10. There are around 12 million blind or visually impaired people in China. Only about 5 percent of the blind in China receive any kind of formal schooling. There are only 105 schools for China's 5 million sight-impaired people.
11. A new law that went into effect in June 1995 banned marriages between people "with certain genetic diseases of a serious nature" unless they agreed to sterilization or long-tern contraception first.
12. Cretinism—mental retardation caused by insufficient consumption of iodine, especially among children born to women with iodine deficiencies—is a problem in the countryside, particularly in China’s poorest provinces. Many villages have a shazi (“idiot”), who is often has no name and is simply called shazi. Many are in their forties or older and are the products of a time when there wasn’t much iodine in the peasant diet.
Source: http://factsanddetails.com
