It is quite obvious that a healthy person is most likely to have a better job and better wage than someone who has been sick all their lives. I thought it was really interesting that if you deworm children at an early age when they are not sick with worms, in their adulthood they will be making 23% more every year which is a great rate of return especially for families living in great poverty. This increase in 23% could mean a healthy more nutritious food, education, or even a better home. We are basically looking at a gain of more than $1,400 over a child's lifetimes with just an investment of less than $1.
If you are looking at an even greater investment than vaccinations for malaria may give you the greatest output. Statistics provided in the online MIT course state that a child not exposed to malaria in childhood would have an income 50% higher for all of their lifetime than a child exposed to malaria. Investment in malaria control measures are quite highly cost effective.
This leads to my question which is...
Why are countries and people not making such an investment if there is such as small input for such a great output?
There is not one answer to this question but possible suggestions could be that a country can not afford to make such an investment because even thought it may seem so little, when you multiply it by its population, the cost becomes much greater. I would still really like to know other reasons as to why countries are not making such an investment.
Deworm? Like we do for dogs? Were are they getting the worm? Water? Food? As for the health focus- these seems like very doable inexpensive investments. You have foundations such as the Gates Foundation focused on stopping illnesses like malaria. What do you think the issue is? Why aren't more countries doing these easy fixes?
ReplyDelete