Germany is in terrible condition this year. This is particularly true of the working masses, who are so undernourished that tuberculosis is having a rich harvest, particularly of adolescent children.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It is a fact that, if I single out Germany, our rate of growth is too low and we have very high unemployment.
The importance in what we're seeing in countries around the world is a poorly regulated and poorly functioning private sector using irrational and ineffective medications that result in the emergence of drug-resistance tuberculosis. What we've done is begun a program to rapidly improve infection control in places that are treating TB patients.
Stopping TB requires a government program that functions every day of the year, and that's hard in certain parts of the world. And partly it's because of who tuberculosis affects: It tends to affect the poor and disenfranchised most.
I was a sickly child, contracting tuberculosis at the age of five.
In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.
Look at the problem of drug-resistant TB in the world. Look at HIV in the world. What's going to be required for everybody in the long run is the ability to do complex health interventions in poor settings.
In a slow-growing world that is short on aggregate demand, Germany's trade surplus is a problem.
Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.
A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.