Amanda Glassman's piece on low-cost preventative measures for reducing non-communicable diseases was featured in The Atlantic.
From the Article
On September 20, heads of state and officials from every country in the world will meet at the United Nations to discuss the non-communicable diseases (NCD) -- heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and asthma -- that are responsible for 63 percent of global deaths annually. Contrary to popular belief, NCD do not primarily affect those of us living in wealthy countries; rather, 80 percent of NCD deaths occur in developing countries, mostly the middle-income countries.
Economic losses in the middle-incomes are likely to be significant. In 2005, China lost 0.31 percent of its GDP to NCD, India lost 0.35 percent and Russia lost 1.13 percent, according to the WHO. These numbers are expected to double or triple by 2015, when Russia is expected to lose up to 5.34 percent of its GDP. Each 10 percent increase in NCD burden is associated with a 0.5 percent reduction in annual economic growth. The opportunity costs of ignoring NCD are high: the World Bank finds that reducing cardiovascular disease mortality by one percent per year between 2010 and 2040 would generate a 68 percent increase in China's real GDP.
Yet the costs of NCD are not only macroeconomic, but in the impact that these illnesses have on poor families. On top of wage losses due to illness or care-taking, for those few people who actually sought health care, spending on NCD was 70 percent of the average monthly income for the poor in India. Similar results are found elsewhere.