Health
Mexico City is home to some of the best private hospitals in the country; Hospital Ángeles, Hospital ABC and Médica Sur to name a few. The national public healthcare institution for private-sector employees IMSS, has its largest facilities in Mexico City, including the National Medical Center and the La Raza Medical Center, and has an annual budget of over 6 billion pesos. The IMSS and other public health institutions, including the ISSSTE (Public Sector Employees' Social Security Institute) and the National Health Ministry (SSA) maintain large specialty facilities in the city. These include the National Institutes of Cardiology, Nutrition, Psychiatry, Oncology, Pediatrics, Rehabilitation, among others.
The World Bank has sponsored a project to curb air pollution through public transport improvements and the Mexican government has started shutting down polluting factories. They have phased out diesel buses and mandated new emission controls on new cars; since 1993 all new cars must be fitted with a catalytic converter, which reduce the emissions released. Trucks must use only liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Also construction of an underground rail system was begun in 1968 order to help curb air pollution problems and alleviate traffic congestion. Today it has over 201 km (125 mi) of track and carries over 5 million people every day. Fees are kept low to encourage use of the system and during rush hours the crush is so great, that authorities have reserved a special carriage specifically for women. Due to these initiatives and others, the air quality in Mexico City has begun to improve, with the air becoming cleaner since 1991, when the air quality was declared to be a public health risk for 355 days of the year.
Read more about this topic: Mexico City
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“We have two kinds of “conference.” One is that to which the office boy refers when he tells the applicant for a job that Mr. Blevitch is “in conference.” This means that Mr. Blevitch is in good health and reading the paper, but otherwise unoccupied. The other type of “conference” is bona fide in so far as it implies that three or four men are talking together in one room, and don’t want to be disturbed.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teenage children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)