Fighting A Fight That Should Already Be Won

TUBERCULOSIS IS AN ANCIENT DISEASE which has killed millions of human beings over thousands of years. It has never relented. It kills millions more today, more than automobile accidents, more than AIDS, more than war. This, despite that a cure for TB was discovered during the nineteen forties, is highly effective, and is widely available today, as it has been for decades. There is a plan, sponsored by the U.N., to inoculate forty million people and to eradicate ninety percent of reported cases, ninety percent of the plague, by the year 2030. Whether protecting forty million people, even forty million annually, can achieve this end remains untested, unproven, and therefor unknown. The problem is the usual one: pervasive poverty. In nearly every country in the world, even wealthy developed countries like the United States, there exists a a largely ignored and quite large impoverished underclass, and it is within this demographic that tuberculosis strikes and spreads, ravaging the population quietly, without much media attention. The wealthy elite and middle classes are well protected, and rarely does the disease strike among the propertied. Only in highly socialized countries such as those of northern Europe where universal health insurance is standard is TB basically unknown. To eliminate poverty would be tantamount to eliminating tuberculosis, and there is no other solution; as long as billions of the planet's population remains desperately poor, human species will be ravaged by disease, as well as hunger, violence, and refugee crises. it is indeed truly amazing the number of the world's problems which could be remedied by simply eliminating poverty from the planet. And much has already been done. Over the past generation, for instance, the global poverty rate has declined from roughly forty percent to a relatively low ten percent, as hybrid grain varieties adn generally improved agriculture methods and distribution systems are showing signs of effectiveness. China, for instance, has essentially lifted all of its people out of poverty, and has created a thriving middle class, and the accompanying billionaire class, in less than a generation, astonishingly. the only discernible price has been massive infusions of carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, resulting in rapidly accelerating global warming, which, obviously, is too great a price to pay. The trick is to eliminate poverty not only by increasing the world's aggregate wealth, but to redistribute what we already have, because we have enough, enough food, enough money, enough everything. The problem is extreme concentration of wealth, world wide. Greater economic equality, less extreme concentrations of wealth, and no poverty seem rather small prices to pay for a safer, healthier, more peaceful planet. what remains is to convince our global leaders, the wealthy, of this obvious fact.