Reading articles like this always makes me so mad. I feel like DWB is one of the few non-profits who is honestly just trying to help, and yet they're so underfunded. Some of this stuff is so cheap, as well - a full course of malaria treatment is between 1 and 5 USD depending on what medication they're using. Mosquito nets are even less. I'm not sure what it costs to treat drug resistant TB, but normal TB treatment is like 10 bucks.
There were more than 600,000 deaths in Africa from malaria last year. Some of those people would have died even with treatment, but assuming those 600k people each got the most expensive malaria treatment, it would have cost 3.27 million USD. And spread across 4 or 5 aid countries, that's next to nothing.
That was kind of a tangent, sorry. I will admit it's way more expensive to treat TB considering I think like roughly a third of the world population has it in some form or another.
Have you ever read Mountains Beyond Mountains? It completely changed my outlook on tb funding. Now it drives me bonkers when people in TB and HIV toss around cost-effectiveness and cost like it matters when people are dying! Considering how much we can spend on a single patient in the first world, we can spend at least that much on thousands of people in the third world.
That's an excellent point about malaria, too. When it's that cheap, rich nations are just showing basic moral deficiency.
I haven't, although it keeps getting assigned as optional reading in my anthro/epidemiology classes and I just never get around to it. I'll be graduating this semester, so maybe in the summer I can finally read it, haha
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Right? I don't understand how governments continue to allow TB to exist. Do they not realize how many people it kills? Do they not realize a tuberculosis epidemic is constantly one plane flight away? Even if these nations only gave half a shit about themselves (which is true) DISEASES FUCKING SPREAD, THAT IS WHAT THEY DO. arghhhh
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barely 10 percent of the global annual estimate of 440,000 new patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) receive treatment.
This is so heartachingly depressing.
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There were more than 600,000 deaths in Africa from malaria last year. Some of those people would have died even with treatment, but assuming those 600k people each got the most expensive malaria treatment, it would have cost 3.27 million USD. And spread across 4 or 5 aid countries, that's next to nothing.
That was kind of a tangent, sorry. I will admit it's way more expensive to treat TB considering I think like roughly a third of the world population has it in some form or another.
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That's an excellent point about malaria, too. When it's that cheap, rich nations are just showing basic moral deficiency.
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