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"enough to improve the health of their own people.
Let’s be frank about this. If these epidemics were raging in the developed world, people with resources would see the suffering and insist that we stop it. But sometimes it seems that the rich world can’t even see the developing world. We rarely make eye contact with the people who are suffering—so we act sometimes as if the people don’t exist and the suffering isn’t happening.
All these factors together have created a tragic inequity between the health of the people in the developed world and the health of those in the rest of the world.
I am here today to talk about how the world, working together, can dramatically reduce this inequity.
I first learned about these tragic health inequities some years ago when I was reading an article about diseases in the developing world. It showed that more than half a million children die every year from “rotavirus.” I thought, “‘Rotavirus?’—I’ve never even heard of it. How could I never have heard of something that kills half a million children every year!?”
I read further and learned that millions of children were dying from diseases that had essentially been eliminated in the United States. Melinda and I had assumed that if there were vaccines and treatments that could save lives, governments would be doing everything they could to get them to the people who needed them. But they weren’t. We couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
Today, in malaria; AIDS; tuberculosis; malnutrition; maternal, newborn, and child illness; and so many other health problems, we are not doing enough to deliver the solutions we do have, and we’re not spending enough to find the solutions we don’t have. As a result, millions of people die every year. This doesn’t tell a flattering story about humanity. But the story isn’t over. In fact, the story is starting to change."
I believe we are on the verge of taking historic steps to reduce disease in the developing world. What will make it possible to do something in the 21st century that we’ve never done before?
Science and technology.
Never before have we had anything close to the tools we have today to both spread awareness of the problems and discover and deliver solutions.
Global communications technology today can show us the suffering of human beings a world away. As the world becomes smaller, this technology will make it harder to ignore our neighbors, and harder to ignore the call of conscience to act.
We are seeing the power of conscience in efforts such as the United States’ Emergency Plan for AIDS, the United Kingdom’s Commission on Africa, and the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria.
But the desire to help means nothing without the capacity to help—and our capacity to help is increasing through the miracles of science. Again and again, over and over, scientists make the impossible possible.
Recent advances in basic research, particularly the sequencing of the genome, give us a foundation for much better progress against all disease. If we match these accelerating capacities of science with the emerging moral awareness of global health inequities—we have an historic chance to build a world where all people, no matter where they’re born, can have the preventive care, vaccines, and treatments they need to live a healthy life.
To build this world, I see four priorities:
First, governments in both developed and developing countries must dramatically increase their efforts to fight disease.
The wealthy world’s governments must not be content to merely increase their commitment every year. They need to match their commitment to the scale of the crisis. Yet, this will not happen unless we see a dramatic increase in the efforts of developing countries to fight the diseases that affect their people.