Four Reasons Everyone Should Care About Global Health
1. Human decency. We're all one planet here. We're all human beings with hopes and dreams and love for our kids. Your relative status on this planet pretty much comes down to luck. We should care for our poor and our sick, because they are people. It is our moral responsibility.
2. Infectious diseases cross borders. A country with a lot of tuberculosis, polio, or other disease becomes a reservoir, continuously spreading illness across borders. It's the health equivalent of a failed state that becomes a haven for terrorism.
3. Poor health saps ambition and slows economic development. You don't start a business if your child is sick; you focus on your child. And a single catastrophic illness can bankrupt an entire extended family, as savings are poured into medical care. Countries with a substantial population of sick people tend to stay poor. I'll quote Bono "The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor." And why do we care if other countries stay poor? Because they can't buy as many products from us, produce as much stuff we might need to buy, or provide employment opportunities for their citizens, thus leading their citizens to illegally immigrate elsewhere.
4. Women around the world are still having more kids than they want to have because they have no way to get contraception. That keeps women from achieving their full potential as people, keeps families poor, and leads to countries which have 40% of their population under 15 years old. A population that young is a recipe for instability, and it strains schools to the breaking point and taxes health care service to their limits (or beyond.)
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