 So if you were to dive down into the very sort of basics of health, what do you think causes poor health? What do you think causes sickness? Well in 2001, the Secretary General at that time of the UN, Kofi Annan said that the greatest enemy of health, and you're gonna have to excuse my writing here, in developing countries is poverty. And I think this is really something that gets at the core of what we're talking about in this course. It gets to the point that poverty is one of the greatest enemies of good health that there is out there, and this lesson we're going to talk a little bit about that. Because I think once you kind of have got that as an idea, and once you sort of start thinking about how health and poverty are related, you can start thinking about solutions and ways that you can fix poor health outcomes in the world. But the question is why? Why does being poor make you more likely to be unhealthy? There are healthy poor people out there, but it's a lot harder, and why is that? Well being poor forces people to make life choices. They're costly to health. So what does that mean? What kind of choices are we talking about here? Well when you're poor, you can't afford always the best food. So sometimes your food choices make you sick down the road. Maybe you can't build yourself the best home, and you get sick because of something like maybe your home allows mosquitoes in and you get malaria because of that, or maybe it's that you can't wear proper clothing, maybe protective clothing at work that keeps you from getting sick from something. Maybe you don't have good access to water. It's a really important one, a very important one, and actually probably one of the most important ones in sort of the current health climate in the world is sanitation. If you don't have good access to good sanitation, so that means your water is being taken away when you're done using it, you're going to have worse health outcomes, and you're not going to be as likely to be healthy. So all of these things go back to this question of resources, because money just is a resource. And it's a resource that can allow you to buy the things that could make you more healthy. Now, there are ways to sort of get around this, but it just is a question of investment by the government and by organizations who are willing to help out. And it's also a question of knowledge as well. We'll talk about that in some other lessons. But let's take a look here at some trends involving all of this. If you go and take a look at some studies that have been done in the last few years, you'll find that healthy life expectancy and GDP, so gross domestic product per person, are actually pretty well connected. I need to correct this GDP. It's kind of hard to read. Oh, I don't know if that helps. Anyway, we'll just go on from here. If you were to make it into a scatter plot, a scatter plot is a kind of graph. You'll see here that if you had zero GDP, you're going to have pretty sick people. So they're going to be not very able to be healthy. But as you move up, so if you move in the plus direction here, and this is life expectancy, so here's like zero years and here's maybe like 80. As GDP grows, health is going to kind of slowly grow. And then there's kind of a tipping point where health outcomes start to go like this. And they flatten out. And at some point they kind of run out. So if you follow this chart, then it kind of says, well, if you're exactly totally broke, you're not necessarily going to live zero years, but you're not going to live very many. And then as your country or as your society gets more rich, you're going to be sort of this point right here. And I kind of would like to think of this as a tipping point where society has enough resources that it can afford to create a healthy society for everyone. It can create a healthy environment for everyone. And it allows for people to live longer. So that point probably happens more like really right here. But you can also see right here, this is kind of a tipping point as well. Because at some point there's sort of a break off where these diseases of modernity and sort of the limits of human of the human body are reached where you can't no matter how many resources you have can't live forever. So that's why millionaires die. And that's why because if they could pay for endless life, maybe they would, but they can't because it's not possible. So there's almost in a way two tipping points here. There's kind of the tipping point of more resources not necessarily meaning better health or longer life. And then there's this tipping point here that's probably the most important tipping point, which is sort of when health becomes something that almost everyone can enjoy, which is very important. If you look at a lot of the states that take up this space right here, many of them are what are called fragile states. Fragile states often are over indebted. So they have lots of they owe lots of money to other countries. And fragile states account for huge a huge percentage of sort of the global health statistics that are sort of in the negative direction. A third of maternal deaths, for example, happen in fragile states or one half of under five deaths. So under five death means someone who dies before reaching the age of five, which is a very clear symbol of something being wrong in a healthcare system or something being wrong in in a country's dealing with the healthcare system. These fragile states are really hard because a lot of organizations don't necessarily want to invest in them because they see that they're fragile and they don't necessarily want to pour lots and lots of money into something that they don't feel like they're going to get a return on. So a lot of times these fragile states are sort of stuck in a position of not really being able to move forward and obviously kind of sliding a little backwards and in terms of their health outcomes at least. And that leads to very high level rates of death and illness, which are really holding back the entire world in a lot of ways. These states are also less likely to reach the MDGs, which we're going to talk about in another lesson.