JAMAICA yesterday declared itself proud of the quality of health it has achieved for a country with limited resources.

But the island’s health minister, John Junor, warned that further advances could be compromised by the growing problem of criminal violence in the country, which, by one account, costs the country about $15 billion in the cost of health care and lost economic activities.

Speaking at the launch in Kingston of the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, world population report on the quality of life globally, Junor noted that life expectancy in Jamaica was 76.1 years, compared to 77.4 years in the United States, 77.5 in Barbados, 77 in Canada and 71.1 in Jamaica’s Caribbean Community (Caricom) partner, Trinidad and Tobago.

Jamaica, despite its economic constraints, had been able to achieve success, Junor said, by maximising its resources.

“So in terms of positive health indicators, Jamaica has managed to maintain stability in the public health system,” Junor said.

But even as he drew attention to Jamaica’s life expectancy and successes achieved by the country over the past five years in meeting the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goads (MGDs), Junor stressed the need for the country to seriously tackle and cauterise the problem of crime and violence, with their burdensome costs to the economy.

There are more than 1,000 murders in Jamaica annually and with nearly 1,300 homicides already this year, 2005 is set to be a record year for killings, cementing the island’s place near the top of the global league table for murders.

But Junor and his health ministry officials stress that violence in Jamaica is as much a public health and economic issue as is law enforcement and social matters.

For instance, in yesterday’s speech, the health minister pointed to a 2004 report for the World Bank by two Jamaican professors, criminologist Anthony Harriot and economist Al Francis, who estimated the $15 billion annual cost from violence.

Harriot and Francis arrived at their estimate by determining the cost to businesses of additional security, extortion, lost sales and lost man hours as well as the cost to the health system.

In fact, a study by two heath ministry officials, Dr Elizabeth Ward and Andrene Grant, determined that it cost Jamaican hospitals about $700 million a year to treat victims, but officials stressed the across the board the number was much higher.

“For the health system as a whole, the cost is two or three times higher,” Dr Ward told the Observer last night.

In his speech yesterday, Junor warned that it was what Jamaicans did now that would determine the kind of country what was left to future generations.

“What kind of citizen do we want to create?” he asked. “Who is this citizen we want to inherit our future?”

Junor’s citizen would be intelligent, compassionate and capable of competing in the world of globalisation. But that citizen would have to be nurtured by a conducive environment and he suggested that would be an environment with less violence.

In the meantime, the UNFPA said global efforts to eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable development would be farfetched if countries do not invest in women and end gender discrimination.

The agency’s report, titled ‘The Promise of Equality: Gender Equity, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals’, underscored the importance for interventions in education, reproductive health and economic opportunities as they relate to women, saying interventions were necessary to achieve millennium goals that were set out by the United Nations in 2000 to cut world poverty by half and reduce other global ills by 2015.