Global Health Inequality Quotes

Four hundred thousand South Africans are dying of AIDS every year. This makes the war on Iraq look like a birthday party.

The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.

90 percent of children with leukemia can be cured, but 90 percent of the children with that disease in the world’s 25 poorest countries die from it.

It's not fair that people ignore AIDS in Africa because it's Africa. It's not fair.

By 2020 the U.S. will be short 91,000 doctors. There's no way we can educate enough doctors to make up that shortfall, and other countries are far worse off.

There is no governing structure for a pandemic, and little more than vague political pressure to ensure limited access to life-sparing tools and medicines for more than half the world population.

[Margaret] Sanger’s hope that the pill might lift women out of poverty and stop the world’s rapid population growth [was futile]. In fact, the pill has been far more popular and had greater impact among the affluent than the poor and has been far more widely used in developed countries than developing ones.

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

No other health disparity is so stark; virtually every woman who dies giving birth lives in a poor country.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.

We have a fee-for-service system that rewards quantity, not quality: profit-driven care rather than patient-driven care. So doctors order more tests, more procedures, and more drugs - we actually consume more prescription drugs in the U.S. than the rest of the world combined.

Most of the people who make decisions about global health are in the U.S. and Western Europe. There, the mental health care system is dominated by highly trained, expensive professionals in big hospitals, who often see patients over long periods of time. This simply can't be done in rural Africa or India. Who the hell can afford that kind of care?