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Excerpt
Discover magazine
April 2002
Discover Dialogue: Jeffrey Sachs
Good Health, Good Wealth
Jeffrey Sachs spent the last decade of the 20th century zipping around the world, advising countries from Bolivia to Mongolia on how to overhaul their economies. Now the renowned Harvard economist has a new global mission: to overhaul the world's health. As chairman of the World Health Organization's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, he recently oversaw a report showing that a small investment in health care in poor countries—about $34 per person per year—would not only reduce disease but would be a boon for the global economy. He discussed this linkage with associate editor Josie Glausiusz....
You helped devise economic transitions in Eastern Europe. How have those changes affected health and environment?
There is a very sharp divide of what happened between Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Half of Poland's debts were cancelled, and Poland actually had a significant improvement of health, higher life expectancy, and a much improved diet: much more fruit and vegetables, much less lard and cholesterol. But the West did not want to help Russia. It was too close to the Cold War. So in Russia and the former Soviet Union there was a terrible health decline.
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