Diseases of Poverty

To become a RESULTS volunteer is not easy. It requires a willingness to learn about poverty, solutions to help people lift themselves out of poverty, learning how to be an advocate for those solutions, learning patience, and learning how to temper anger and frustration with hope and a kind of love like that exemplified in the Christian story of the Good Samaritan.

People usually think of poverty and disease as separate issues. Because of RESULTS, I’ve learned that many diseases are so intertwined with poverty that they are called “diseases of poverty”. Poverty conditions like unclean water and little to non-existent sewage systems, tightly packed living conditions, lack of health care resources, and ignorance increase the chances of getting one of these diseases and reduce stricken people’s chances of surviving these diseases. On the other side of the spiral, for the very poor in the world trying to survive on less than $1.25 a day, getting a disease often means the end of whatever meager savings they may have accumulated, selling possessions, taking children out of school in order to work in place of a stricken parent, and for the truly desperate, selling children to others in the hopes of providing a better home for the children and to raise money for medicine. Poverty can lead to disease and disease can lead to poverty. Together, poverty and disease create a vicious downward spiral often ending in an early death.

What are the “diseases of poverty”? AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are the three infectious diseases with the highest mortality rates worldwide. In 2009 they killed 3.2 million people according to the Kaiser Family Foundation: AIDS 1,800,000; tuberculosis 1,300,000; and malaria 117,704. The other diseases of poverty are measlespneumonia, and diarrheal diseases according to Wikipedia.

How do I know all this? Because I’ve learned these issues to become an effective RESULTS volunteer.

At 8:30, Sunday morning, June 19, 2011 I continued my education by attending a learning session at the RESULTS International Conference on the affects of tuberculosis on women and children around the world. TB holds particular interest to me; my mother’s mother died of TB when my mother was eight years old. Her father died a few years later leaving my mother an orphan. Luckily, she had family to take her in and when, during the Great Depression her relations could no longer afford to take care of her, there was a Latter Day Saints orphanage for her to go to. Many children today are not so lucky and end up as beggars and thieves growing up alone in villages and slums. I often wonder how my mother’s life would have been different if her mother had not died to TB.

At the conference  learning session, I heard Mandy Slutsker and Paul Jensen, two RESULTS Educational Fund researchers, present findings from their soon to be published report on TB’s impact on women and children. I jotted down the following notes:

  • According to a 2008 World Health Organization report, 3.6 million women get TB each year and about 500,000 will die from it. This makes TB the third leading killer of women worldwide.
  • About 100,000 men will divorce his wife because she became infected with TB.
  • TB is one cause of maternal mortality. It’s no wonder to me that a pregnant woman whose body is weakened by TB often would not be able to survive the stress of childbirth.
  • Over one million children a year get TB and about 176,000 will die from it.
  • For some reason, TB in children often appears in the spinal cord rather than in the lungs. This kind of TB is called TB meningitis and is harder to detect than TB in the lungs.
  • Sputum analysis is the current standard tool to identify TB. Because children do not cough up sputum, TB is harder to detect in children than in adults.
  • There are no standard treatment regimen for children. Medical personnel must use their best judgement in determining drug dosages and frequency of administering drugs.
  • For fear of endangering children’s lives, children are excluded from TB drug trials.

Based on their study, the researchers recommend that TB services be integrated into maternal and child health programs. Screening for and treating TB through TB specific health programs causes duplication of clinic overhead costs, can stigmatize women who go to the clinic, and delays identification of the disease. In countries where TB is prevalent, it’s cheaper to automatically screen for TB than to wait for active TB symptoms to appear and treat the patient AND those the patient has infected while developing active TB.

Many Westerners think TB is no longer a problem; many Westerners are ignorant. One of the primary purposes of RESULTS is education–promoting policies to educate children around the world and educating citizens in developed nations of the facts of poverty.

That is why, even as a severely under-employed freelance writer, I dipped into my own savings to fly out to Washington, DC for the conference. My wanting to learn more about poverty and to become a better advocate for ending the worst aspects of it outweighed my reluctance to dip into my savings. I think of my grandmother dying of TB. Back then there were no cures; today there are.

Shamefully though, because of a variety of political decisions in both developed and less developed countries, many, if not most, of those suffering and dying of TB and other diseases of poverty cannot get treatment. The diseases of poverty mostly affect the poor, hence the name. The victims mostly live in less developed countries with appallingly under resourced health systems.

Because the victims are mostly poor, the countries in which they live are mostly poor, and neither has the capability to capture the attention of an ignorant public in wealthy countries sufficient political will to significantly change this reality does not yet exist.

NOTE: In this posting, I’ve included references to several Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is a favorite reference of mine, but I’ve learned to be especially cautious with it. Check the Discussion tab at the top of each entry in Wikipedia to get a sense of how well the entry stands against encyclopedic standards.