June 20, 2017 – US and Global Health

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Anchor lead: Should the US continue its investment in global health? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Under the Trump administration the US is slated to reduce and restrict support to many global health efforts, a recent study in the Lancet revealed. While such cuts may be initially attractive from a strictly monetary perspective, they may be quite short sighted with regard to preserving health right here in the US. That’s according to Mike Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Klag: We have to view global health and aid as an investment. It’s an investment in the health of the world but it’s an investment in the health of the United States. They give the example of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which happened in 2003. It only lasted a few months. In those few months it cost the world somewhere around 50 billion dollars. In the US alone, in Ebola outbreak, we had one death of an imported case and then several people got infected. We spent 5.4 billion dollars in response to that epidemic. The point is that keeping the world safe keeps us safe.  :32

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.