Sickness and Wealth

Excerpt

From the Preface

In 2003, I met Dr. Steve Gloyd, one of the contributors to this fine book, at a meeting about implementing HIV treatment in resource poor settings. The meeting was held at our hospital in rural Haiti and was attended by AIDS experts from many developed countries. While many well meaning, European and North American medical academics, very new to the health landscape in the developing world, debated the merits of one HIV treatment regimen over another, Steve and I bemoaned the profound and entrenched poverty that underlies the fragile existence of the poor and the abysmal state of the public health sector that is charged with caring for them. At this well attended HIV treatment meeting, only the small group of us who regularly face the stark contrast between the developed and developing worlds continually returned from the important clinical discussion of HIV treatment to the more pressing problem of the international financial policies that foment poor health; the corporate interests and the neoliberal economic "reforms" which demand that governments decrease their public service budgets to promote the unfettered march toward the "free" market. No doubt, our clinical and scientific colleagues from places like United States, France, and England thought that such policy arguments should be vetted elsewhere, after all, we had come to Haiti to talk about scaling up access to ...

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Praise

“A timely, radical, and accessible tool for understanding the corporate attack on health care as a right. An exceptional mix of activist and scholarly voices makes Sickness and Wealth stand apart. This book is indispensable to those interested in health and social justice.”
—Sarah Shannon, Hesperian Foundation

“Sickness and Wealth arrives none too soon. This important book is published as a growing unease spreads among those who have access to books, whether published in English or any other language. The reading classes are learning what the world’s bottom billion have long been forced to know: that global economic and social arrangements are increasingly inegalitarian and are bad for our health. Militarization, privatization, and unfair trade policies are in fact tightly linked to diseases such as malaria, cholera, and AIDS; current policies have sapped the movement for primary health care for all. Sickness and Wealth exposes the mechanisms of these connections. ‘Knowledge is power’ now sounds like a silly piety in large part because the vast preponderance of knowledge long available buttresses the central theses of this book. Power is power. But Sickness and Wealth gives teachers and activists and other concerned citizens of a sickly planet a new tool, one designed to help us do more than merely...

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Interview

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