Copenhagen Consensus 2012: Five ways to step up the battle against the biggest killer diseases

It is difficult to overstate how much the fight against infectious diseases has improved the human condition in the last century. In research released today, for Copenhagen Consensus 2012, economists Dean Jamison, Prabhat Jha, Ramanan Laxminarayan, and Toby Ord point out that improved immunization saves more lives per year than would be saved by global peace. The same is true for smallpox eradication, diarrhea treatment, and malaria treatment. Nonetheless major problems remain, and Jamison’s team explores the ways to step up our battle against the biggest killer diseases, identifying five top priorities. 1. The most important of these is malaria treatment. The malaria parasite has developed a resistance to the effective, inexpensive, and widely available drugs that have previously provided an important partial check on the high levels of malaria child deaths in Africa. The resistance to these older drugs is leading to a rise in deaths and illness that could...