Question

What is the relationship between the wealth of a country and the health of its population, and what is the relevance to population health?

Discuss why you do or do not believe that increased wealth is always associated with increased health.

Provide real-world examples to illustrate your points.

Answer 1

There is one phrase in English literature “Health is Wealth” which means person with good health has richest wealth in itself. Health and wealth are nothing but the two sides of single coin co-related to each other.

We can say wealth of country is totally dependent on health of its population and they are relevant to each other; as healthy people can work longer and harder than sick people which will ultimately make countries economy stronger. Healthier children are most likely to stay active longer and learn more which would result in earning more when they enter the workforce.

Even across world the relationship seems clear, countries with better health are richer and those which focus on improving health of their citizen’s grow faster. For example we can consider some instances in the 1940s, several medical innovations involving penicillin, streptomycin and DDT made it easier to treat diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and yellow fever that disproportionately affected people in developing countries. Improvements in health led to these poor countries with prior improvements in the economic circumstances. This international revolution in public resulted in increase in life expectancy in poor countries by the 1950s. However some researchers reported that income per head actually declined when life expectancy went up.

Rreal time data of world can be correlated with this phenomenon as we can see the developing countries such as India are focusing on health of country and spending millions on health and related issues rather than spending on infrastructure as 70 % population of country is young and if they adopt to healthy lifestyle it will deliver to the country for better wealth in future.

Improving the wealth of country is often proposed as a way to improve their population health so to achieve that goal reduction in health inequalities is necessary. It is important to understand how wealth influences health as it is believe that increased health is often associated with increased health.

Following are the key points to be considered

1. Increased wealth lead to access of quality health services and increased life expectancy.
2. It is observed that stress of not having enough wealth may affect the health of individuals.
3. If wealth of country is strong enough then country can afford health promotional activities and able to spend on health issues of population.
4. Strong wealth helps to engage the society in healthy lifestyle and adopt better health services.
5. Healthy wealth of country leads to betterment of circumstances and developed infrastructure which are more likely the causes of unhealthy society.
6. Being in poor wealth affects education and employment opportunities across the country leading to unhealthy habits and addiction of abuse resulting in overall impact on health of population.