Article Document Academic Article Information Content Entity Continuant Continuant Journal Article Entity Entity Generically Dependent Continuant 2025-05-09T22:26:17 RDF description of Poverty, global health, and infectious disease: lessons from Haiti and Rwanda - http://repository.healthpartners.com/individual/document-rn16082 Economics Socioeconomic Factors 17198 public 2022-02-21T22:48:57.408-06:00 Infectious Disease Clinics of North America Infectious Diseases 10.1016/j.idc.2011.05.004 11309 25 Epidemiology 3 Poverty, global health, and infectious disease: lessons from Haiti and Rwanda document-rn16082 <p>Poverty and infectious diseases interact in complex ways. Casting destitution as intractable, or epidemics that afflict the poor as accidental, erroneously exonerates us from responsibility for caring for those most in need. Adequately addressing communicable diseases requires a biosocial appreciation of the structural forces that shape disease patterns. Most health interventions in resource-poor settings could garner support based on cost/benefit ratios with appropriately lengthy time horizons to capture the return on health investments and an adequate accounting of externalities; however, such a calculus masks the suffering of inaction and risks eroding the most powerful incentive to act: redressing inequality.<p>