Multimedia

Ten years after President Clinton's initiative to avert a global epidemic of tobacco-related disease, smoking is down in the United States but rising fast in poor countries, where Washington turns a blind eye to aggressive cigarette marketing banned at home.

My guest on this show is Thomas Bollyky, a visiting fellow here at CGD. Tom recently marked the 10th anniversary of Clinton’s order with articles in Foreign Policy and the Journal of the American Medical Association about how U.S. efforts to combat the global tobacco epidemic have remained modest, while tobacco companies have aggressively expanded markets for their products and opposed tobacco control and prevention programs in low- and middle-income countries.

Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancers are usually considered diseases of the rich world, the result of too much food and too little exercise. But these serious diseases are already a huge problem in the developing world, accounting for about half of the burden of disease. Yet new research from the Center for Global Development has found that barely 3% of foreign aid and philanthropic spending for developing world health addresses these often overlooked diseases.

My guest this week is the lead author of that research, Rachel Nugent, CGD deputy director of global health. In a forthcoming working paper co-authored with Andrea Feigl – Scarce Donor Funding for Non-Communicable Diseases: Will it Contribute to a Health Crisis? – Rachel examines the impact of non-communicable diseases in the developing world and assesses the response of international donors. In the Wonkcast, we discuss her findings and recommendations for addressing this challenge.