> It is easy to sit in air-conditioned office in New York or Amsterdam
> and "critique predominantly 'high-tech' approach to public health problem.
> If on the other hand, one lives in countries like, say, Ethiopia where
> people are mostly free of the "evils" of high tech medicine, one takes a
> different view. If I were to choose between being a limbless (due to
> untreated leprosy) beggar on the streets of Addis and an overmedicated New
> Yorker, thank you, but I'll keep my high-tech medicine.
Wojtek, with all due respect, this is a really lame response.
I know zippo about the etiology and treatment of leprosy, to use the example you raise, but I see this text on the WHO's leprosy home page:
[...]
Today, diagnosis and treatment of leprosy is easy. Essential work is being carried out to integrate leprosy services into existing, general health services. This is especially important for communities at risk for leprosy, which are often the poorest of the poor and under-served.
[...]
from: http://www.who.int/lep/
So, surprise, surprise, it appears there is a link between poverty and leprosy. It looks like your hypothetical limbless beggar in Addis Abba is as much or more the victim poor nutrition and sanitation, and other side-effects of poverty, as he is the victim of lack of access to "high-tech" medicine, This buttresses precisely the point made in the Lancet article I cited, which is that the major advances in public health in advanced western societies appears to have been largely due to economic growth and rising standards of living, not "miracle drugs", and the same would apply to Africa and other impoverished parts of the world.
This is not to imply that high-tech drugs don't work, or that poor Africans don't need them, or that Bill Gates shouldn't spend millions on the development of an anti-malaria drug. Quite the contrary.
If you don't want to take the trouble to read the original Lancet article I cited, that's your business, but presenting a false dichotomy like the one above is little more than a lazy attempt to score a cheap debating point.
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam