Want to save millions of lives? Cut salt, tobacco and alcohol intake

Once, tuberculosis was one of the world’s greatest preoccupations. Consumption, as it was known, killed indiscriminately, claiming luminaries like Franz Kafka, John Keats, and US President James Monroe. In the last two centuries, TB has claimed more lives than any other disease: an unprecedented and unsurpassed death toll of one billion.

Thanks to the advent of a vaccine and cheap drugs, TB kills very few people in the developed world nowadays. So it has quickly been forgotten in rich countries – thought of as a relic from the Victorian era.

Global leaders recently swept into New York for the United Nations General Assembly, trailed by thousands of media, activists and protestors. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at the exactly same time revealed much about their priorities—and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems.

By Nicholas Newman, Oxford Prospect.  Increasingly, we are hearing the term that something must be done to solve the world’s almost never-ending ending crises. The media is full of pressing appeals that every problem is urgent and must be tackled immediately, with often little regard to the economic and social costs involved. Unfortunately, for policy makers, the real world of geopolitics and budgetary issues forces politicians to prioritise decisions. Often such policy decisions will be both tough to make and politically unpopular with the public at large.