The World by Richard Haass
Author:Richard Haass [Haass, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-11T16:00:00+00:00
Global Health
There is a persuasive case to be made that global health is considerably better now than at any other time in human history. And there is a case to be made that people and governments nevertheless should be concerned given developments in the health sphere and the gap between these challenges and the readiness of the world to meet them. In this latter sense, global health is but another example of the gulf between globalization’s challenges and the adequacy of the collective response.
The reason all this matters stems from the obvious—we all want to live long lives in which we are able to perform mentally and physically at a high level, and for humanitarian reasons we would like others to as well—to the less than obvious, including the relationship between a society’s overall health and its economic performance, political stability, and national security. Health-related costs and crises can turn a strong, successful society into a weak and dysfunctional one. Preventing, detecting, and responding to outbreaks in other countries can slow or prevent those outbreaks from spreading to your country. Health care is also central to the global economy because close to 10 percent of global economic output is spent on it. In the United States, spending on health is now estimated to be no less than 18 percent of its gross domestic product.
The world’s population is approaching eight billion, eight times the population two centuries ago, four times what it was one century ago, and roughly twice as large as it was as recently as fifty years ago. A principal reason for this increase is that life expectancy has dramatically risen. The typical person in the world today can expect to reach his or her seventy-second birthday. In some of the wealthier countries, a person can expect to reach his or her eightieth birthday; Japan is a global leader, with a life expectancy of eighty-four years. Increasing numbers of people live into their nineties and even beyond. This average longevity is more than double what it was a century ago, which reflects a sharp increase in the average life span of those living in poorer or developing countries. The reasons for longer lives include better diet, enormous progress in the fields of medicine and health—in particular, both child and maternal mortality are down—and fewer large-scale wars. The average woman lives several years longer than her male counterpart. Due to the decline in under-five mortality since 2000, fifty million children’s lives were saved.
Many factors account for this progress, including improvements in medical care ranging from prevention to diagnosis to treatment, breakthroughs in technology and drugs, education that has changed individual behavior for the better, improvements in diet and nutrition, and aid provided to low-income countries to bolster their health-care systems. The eradication or near eradication of several infectious diseases that previously ravaged populations is a case in point. Smallpox was officially eradicated as of 1980. Polio cases have decreased by more than 99 percent since 1988 and are now extremely rare.
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