Globalization's raw deal for the Gap on health

GLOBALISATION AND HEALTH: "The maladies of affluence: The poor world is getting the rich world's diseases," The Economist, 11 August 2007,p. 49.

The raw deal is this: far longer lives but not a commensurate capacity to deal with chronic disease.

A great graph charts this: Low income economies feature more deaths by percentage from infections (almost 50%) than chronic (just over 40%). But already by low-middle (my New Core low-end) income, it's chronic (75%) way over infectious (just over 15%). That skew only gets heavier as you grow in income.

The problem is natural enough: I get some money for disposable income and I like my cigs, my liquor and my fattier foods. For example, 300m Chinese men smoke today, which pretty much guarantees you'll have a huge cancer industry right on the heels of its emergence. Nowadays, one-fifth of Chinese kids are overweight, the unsurprising affliction of all those "little emperors" (or one-child boys).

A big problem with emerging economies in this regard: they still focus so heavily on infections that they truly short themselves on assets for dealing with chronic problems.

Comments

[Michael]

Seems to me it's potentially more complicated than the article lets on. How many of those infectious diseases are only held low because of the effort currently put into them? How many of those families current sacrificing for their elders would instead be sacrificing for their children if resources shifted? For that matter, HIV/AIDS is an oddball because it's a n infectious AND a chronic disease all at once.