Cost-Effective Strategies Can Reduce Health Inequality, Tackle ‘Urgent’ Health Concerns, Opinion Piece Says
Current tools for improving health are "so powerful and inexpensive that health conditions could be reasonably good" in developing countries if policymakers spent "relatively little in the right places," Dean Jamison, an economist and professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, and Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, write in a Taipei Times opinion piece.
Recent research for CCC highlights six "highly cost-effective" strategies to tackle the world's "most urgent" health problems, Jamison and Lomborg write. HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria are among the top health concerns on the list, according to the authors. They add that "the most promising investment is in TB treatment" because the disease affects "working-age people" and can lead to household poverty. Jamison and Lomborg write that spending $1 billion on TB treatment in one year could save one million lives and that the economic benefits of TB control could amount to $30 billion.
Jamison and Lomborg also write that investing $1 billion in malaria efforts would "expand the provision" of insecticide-treated nets and effective drugs. This could save more than one million child deaths and "produce economic benefits worth $20 billion," according to the authors. They also note that the Affordable Medicine Facility-malaria, which subsidizes treatment for people in malaria-endemic countries, is a "particularly attractive mechanism for committing resources to malaria control."
In addition, "combination prevention" of HIV/AIDS -- which includes "simultaneous and substantial" increases in condom distribution, male circumcision, peer interventions among commercial sex workers and the treatment of sexually transmitted infections -- have produced the "greatest successes" in controlling the disease, the authors write. According to Jamison and Lomborg, it would take $2.5 billion to prevent two million new HIV cases each year, but the benefits would be "12 times higher."
They write that their suggestions target "specific areas of need" rather than strengthen the overall health system. The authors conclude that even if the costs of these initiatives were "two or three times higher" than they estimate, the "efforts would still provide amazing opportunities to reduce health inequality and do good in the world" (Jamison/Lomborg, Taipei Times, 5/18).
