Health and Poverty

Health and Poverty 1: Reducing Mortality among Rich and Poor.Health is probably the most important asset a poor person—or any person “owns.” Improvements in health have been extraordinary in the post-war period, but rich and poor are still subject to very different risks: the world’s rich die of chronic diseases, the poor of communicable ones that are in principle quite easily preventable: HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, childhood infectious diseases (many of which are preventable by vaccination), and maternal and perinatal conditions. We address health in two steps, looking first at the sources of mortality and then at interventions to improve health.