AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
Interpretation
Global health issues like AIDS, malaria, and TB threaten national security and require urgent funding.
Jared Diamond highlights the importance of addressing significant global health challenges such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, framing them as national security concerns. He emphasizes that the financial resources needed to tackle these health issues are minimal compared to military expenditures, suggesting that prioritizing health can lead to broader benefits for society and stability.
In practice
In a speech addressing global health initiatives, I would quote Jared Diamond to emphasize the importance of prioritizing health over military spending.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
Insurance companies, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry all push for mental health care that is brief, intermittent, and focused on quick fixes, despite the fact that many people struggle with emotional difficulties that can only be addressed over time using special psychodynamic skills.
Physical well-being is not only a priceless asset to oneself-it is a heritage to be passed on. With good health, all other activities of life are greatly enhanced. A clean mind in a healthy body enables one to render far more effective service to others. It helps one provide more vigorous leadership. It gives our every experience in life more zest and more meaning. Robust health is a noble and worthwhile attainment.
And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.
Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.
If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed.
Travelling is good for your health and necessary for your amusement.
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