Disease and Poverty

THERE IS A direct correlation between poverty and disease. Poverty creates a cyclical relationship with disease for vulnerable groups and countries in that it causes people and countries to be hopeless, unaccountable, and irresponsible, which in turn creates the conditions for disease to fester and spread. Thus, from a human behavior perspective, many of the diseases that are causing so much suffering in our world today could be prevented if individuals and governments would be responsible in their behavior.

While this may come as a harsh indictment, an analysis of the causes and spread of some of the deadliest diseases will reveal that they could be contained if governments and individuals acted in ways that would minimize their outbreak and spread. However, governments and people in poor countries have not acted to curb diseases because they do not have the resources with which to act in the first place. Therein lie the dilemma and hopelessness of disease control in poor countries.

The deadliest diseases are found predominantly in the poorest regions of the world. The poorest people in these places are the most vulnerable as well. Sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia are the two regions in the world where the human cost of disease is greatest and poverty levels are highest. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world now where poverty levels keep rising and more people are afflicted with killer diseases every year.

In a feature article in Time in March 2005, Jeffrey Sachs drew attention to the persistence of poverty in Africa by stating that “while the economic boom in East Asia has helped reduce the proportion of the extreme poor in that region from 58 percent in 1981 to 15 percent in 2001, and in south Asia from 52 percent to 31 percent, the situation is deeply entrenched in Africa, where almost half of the continent's population lives in extreme poverty—a proportion that has actually grown worse over the past two decades as the rest of the world has grown more prosperous.”

The magnitude of poverty in Africa can be appreciated from the Live 8 Concerts that Bob Geldof, in association with other activist musicians, organized in different cities across the globe to draw the attention of G-8 leaders meeting in Scotland in July 2005 to poverty in Africa. Geldof organized a similar concert in 1985 to raise money to fight African poverty in Ethiopia.

[Page 264]Twenty years later, the situation appears to have worsened. One of the clearest expressions of the links between disease and poverty is the HIV/AIDS pandemic.