<
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5246014/tb-tuberculosis-brazil-poverty-cash-transfer>
'What if the best medicine isn't a pill or vaccine — but it's cold cash?
There's a growing body of research that suggests economic programs that give
money to very poor people can have major health benefits. Now, a new study —
out on Friday in
Nature Medicine — proves this approach can work when it
comes to the world's deadliest infectious disease: tuberculosis, which killed
more than 1.25 million people in 2023.
The study is impressive in its scale. Researchers combined two Brazilian
datasets — one from the Ministry of Health and one that tracks social programs
for the poorest half of the population — enabling them to zero in on 54 million
people in Brazil living in poverty. In this group, 44% of them received cash
each month from a government program while 56% did not. The families that
received the cash were significantly less likely to contract TB. Among the
extremely poor in this category, TB cases and deaths dropped by more than 50%
and in the Indigenous population the drop was even more dramatic: more than
60%.
"There are very large benefits — large and underappreciated — of these [types
of] programs," says Dr. Aaron Richterman, an assistant professor of infectious
diseases and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who was not
involved in the study.
The findings could have far-reaching implications for global efforts to end the
TB epidemic. "If we think about what can take us to the next level, it's not
the next drug," he says. "It's probably not the vaccine that we're all waiting
for. It may be something like this, which I think we have good reason to
believe would help potentially end something like a TB epidemic."
Here's a look at how the conditional cash transfer program works, why it's
having unintentional – but welcome – health impacts and what the implications
are.'
Via
What Could Go Right? The Year Ahead
https://theprogressnetwork.org/potential-progress-2025/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
