How $4 bednets could cut malaria deaths in half

We’re erring on the side of positive expectations again. This time with Bjørn Lomborg. His new book is Best Things First. There he sets his sights on cost effective, acheivable goals that will lift the world’s poorest out of miserable conditions and inch us along in the direction towards those sustainable goals we hear about so much. We ask the minuscule billions of dollars question: Are the world’s most prosperous ready for such tangible win-win?

In a world prone to fickle media attention to short-term crises, we often neglect to consider a long-term game plan for humanity. But right now the world’s 193 governments are gearing up to set our priorities for the next decade and a half at the United Nations’ annual meeting in September 2015. This is a debate worth having, but almost no one has heard anything about it.

COPENHAGEN ― West Africa's Ebola epidemic has dominated headlines for much of the last year. But, as devastating as that outbreak has been, its death toll of less than 20,000 people is dwarfed by that of preventable diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which together caused more than three million deaths in 2013, hitting the world's poorest people the hardest. This need not be the case; indeed, addressing these diseases would be an extraordinarily good investment.