Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0038187 (starvation)
 24,951 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

A precarious balance exists on earth between food and people, and at this time 800 million people are starving or close to starvation. When agriculture began, say 10,000 years ago, human populations were low. They stayed roughly in balance with the food supply. After agriculture, food supplies increased as did populations. The discovery of the New World opened vast resources, more land. Human numbers began to climb. Inventions and machines increased the ability to exploit resources. With modern medicine came a decline in death rates while birthrates remained high. The result is the 20th century population now totals 4.7 billion. By 2000, it will probably reach 6.1 billion and 7.8 billion by 2020. There will be insufficient cropland to produce the food all these people will need. People have been moving into sprawling urban centers of the poor countries. They come in search of jobs because there is not enough land to support them in rural areas. They increase the numbers of the unemployed and live in squalid shanty towns. Each agricultural or industrial advance that has occurred has been overwhelmed by ever increasing numbers of people in many less developed nations. There appears to be no "catching up" with the world's soaring rate of population. About 40 years ago this dilemma began to alarm some people. Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt believed that food and economic aid should continue but would be only a stopgap until developing countries were able to control their population growth. This meant cutting the birthrate. They reasoned that the best way to accomplish this was to educate people about contraceptives and other methods of limiting fertility. Private foundations funded educational programs, and many governments began giving out contraceptives at little or no cost. Despite such efforts, populations continued to increase in places that could least support more people. Already controversial, population control programs began to offer various incentives to get couples to limit their families. Facing up to the challange of population means considering a great variety of deeply held personal, moral, ethnic, cultural, national, and religious convictions.
 ...
PMID:The challenge of population growth. 1217 4