Crispin Hull

Guest Columnist

The gathering of Covid statistics and the scorecard mentality in developed countries, overshadows more deadly world health matters.

In the developed world we have largely overcome infectious diseases (until now). Very few people die of them. Instead we kill ourselves through poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking and excessive drinking leading to heart disease and cancers.

So when an infectious disease starts killing people we get alarmed. But from the perspective of the developing world and poorer nations, Covid, with just 745,000 deaths worldwide and just 37 deaths per 1000 cases is small beer.

The Big Three pathogens – HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria – cause hundreds of millions of infections annually and collectively kill more than five million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The economic waste and human suffering is immense, but there is no scramble to get a vaccine or deliver treatments in the way that an eye on huge expected profits for selling a vaccine in rich developed countries is sending drug companies into a frenzy.

The travesty is that all of the three “perpetual” epidemics are preventable and largely treatable.

Bacterial, viral, and parasitic diseases cause only about 163 000 deaths a year in the developed world compared to 9.2 million deaths (mostly among children) in the developing world. Nearly all would be treatable or preventable with comparatively small amounts of money.

Incidentally, Jonathan Swan is the son of journalist and physician Norman Swan who has done so much towards public understanding of Covid and health in general in Australia.

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Crispin Hull is a current columnist and the former Editor of the Canberra Times.