Redressing the Unconscionable Health Gap: A Global Plan for Justice

By LAWRENCE O. GOSTIN

Consider two children—one born in sub-Saharan Africa and the other in the United States. The African child is twenty-five times more likely to die in the first five years of life; if she lives to child-bearing age, she is a two hundred times more likely to die in labor; and overall, she will die thirty years earlier than the American child. The global health gap between rich and poor is vast: “in one year alone, fourteen million of the poorest people in the world died [prematurely], while only four million would have died if this population had the same death rate as the global rich.”

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