The beneficiaries of World Friends’ projects come from backgrounds marked by poverty, violence, criminality, prostitution, the precariousness of housing and work, pollution, diseases. The health problems found by the health workers of World Friends are innumerable: gastroenteritis and severe respiratory diseases, especially in children; a permanent status of malnutrition and the presence of typhoid fever and malaria. Tuberculosis is in evident recrudescence; the number of children with physical handicaps is high. The diagnosis of ailments requiring surgery and the incidence of cancer – the latter showing a clear increase – is often delayed due to the intrinsic inefficiencies of the health systems in African countries. The lack of specialist services for diagnosis and treatment accessible to the poor worsens the outcomes of traumas and burns, very frequent among children, often causing permanent disabilities in a context where physical integrity is linked to the survival of the individual. The transmission of sexual diseases is very widespread, AIDS in particular being a very real scourge.
