The Disease Gap Is Widening

You know all about the digital divide because it's a banner issue among first-world people into emerging technology. You hear about how internet access should be a human right, and that infringement upon download speeds is just so fucked and why aren't you in particular writing letters to Congress or picketing the FCC right now? That's fine. Technology is accelerating, and if we let things like net neutrality get away from us, it's reasonable to worry whether it will be possible to ever catch up again.

But technological acceleration has the interesting feature of positively feeding back on itself, accelerating acceleration. Moore's Law might be an illustration of the effect, as Moore's prediction of advancing circuit development failed to account for the increased effort put forth in transistor design … as the result of Moore's prediction.

The effect holds in medicine. We already know about the disproportionate emphasis put on research involving ailments of the developed world, particularly old-age diseases like cancer and COPD. So, while cancer treatment options become increasingly amazing with new and better biotechnology, people in the developing world die young of easy-to-defeat illnesses. This is the disease divide, and it too is faced with a future of accelerating widening.

A new study from the University of Edinburgh, published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, poured through the details of every meeting of the World Health Organization's decision-making body since 1948, looking for both recognition of and funding allocations for three devastating illnesses concentrated in developing nations: anthrax, brucellosis, and bovine tuberculosis. All three are easily managed with the right tools, and in the developed world they've all but been eradicated. But these diseases, all characterized by transmission between between animals and humans, force thousands of preventable deaths in the developing world while putting food and water supplies at risk.

"It is extraordinary that in the 21st century we are failing to manage brucellosis and the other neglected zoonotic diseases that impact so severely on rural communities in developing economies when, for many of these diseases, the tools to manage them are well developed," said lead author Sue Welburn in a statement.

The barrier, the researchers say, is largely enforced by a lack of health care infrastructure. It's also self-reinforcing. "There are a number of reasons for such neglect, largely driven by the fact that their burden is often solely found in developing countries, where the majority of effort in recent years has focused on HIV/AIDs, tuberculosis, and malaria," the Welburn et al write in the paper. "However, it is also difficult to gather information about the extent and impact of these diseases of the poor due to ineffective diagnostic capacity and poor health delivery systems that result in underestimation of disease burden.

"Unless a problem can be quantified, it is difficult to argue for funding and attention by policy makers," the authors continue.

I don't mention this in light of our digital concerns to heap some first-world-problems shame on advocates. These same concerns will one day be shared by the regions currently suffering at the far side of the disease divide, so long as the overall split, which is simply technological in the most general sense, is managed aggresively. Defeating diseases that are already defeated in principle is an excellent place to build one critical bridge of many.