Investing in Health

Excerpt

Although the magnitude of possible gains in health was clear by the early 1990s, it is even clearer today: focused attention by health systems on delivering powerful but often inexpensive interventions can lead to dramatic improvements in health at modest cost. Globalization has helped diffuse knowledge about what those interventions are and how health systems can deliver them. The pace of diffusion of such knowledge into a country—much more than its level of income—determines the pace of health improvement in that country. Our purpose in Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 2nd edition (DCP2), is to help speed the diffusion of policy-relevant knowledge.

This introductory chapter to DCP2 serves two purposes:

1. First, it provides the context for the rest of the book by discussing broad trends in health conditions, by summarizing health conditions of the world at the dawn of the 21st century, and by pointing to recent research suggesting that the economic benefits from successful investments in health are likely to be exceptionally high.

2. Second, it highlights some of the main messages for policy that emerge from the 37 chapters that deal with conditions and risk factors and the 21 chapters that deal with strengthening health systems. These highlights are deliberately brief because chapters 2 and 3 summarize the remainder of the book: chapter 2 summarizes findings about intervention costzeffectiveness from across the book, and chapter 3 synthesizes findings on strengthening health systems.