Pestilences in the 20th Century - Disease and Poverty

Other diseases relentlessly kill despite the existence of effective weapons to combat them. Consider, for example, spinal meningitis. There are vaccines to prevent meningitis and drugs to cure it.  An outbreak raged in sub-Saharan Africa early in 1996.  You likely heard little about it; yet, it killed more than 15,000 people-mostly poor, mostly children.

Lower respiratory infections, including pneumonia, kill four million people each year, most of them children. Measles kills one million children yearly, and whooping cough a further 355,000. Many of these deaths too could be prevented by inexpensive vaccines.

Some eight thousand children die each day from diarrheic dehydration.  Almost all these deaths could be prevented  by good sanitation or clean drinking water or by the administration of oral rehydration solution. 

Most of these deaths take place in the developing world, where poverty  is abundant. About 800 million people-a sizable part of the world's population-have no access to health care.  Stated the World Health Report 1995. The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost as the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code 259.5-extreme poverty."

Next time: Pestilences of the 20th Century - Newly Recognized Diseases

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