AmfAR's World AIDS Day symposium, United Nations, November 30, 1999. The health and wealth of nations.

Abstract

501 LET ME THANK YOU for the invitation to speak to you, and I confess that I made a special effort to be here today because of David Bloom. I admire his work a great deal, and perhaps the best compliment I can give him is that I have plagiarized the title of one of his papers—“The Health and Wealth of Nations,” but perhaps giving a little more affirmation to the direction of the causality, I have used the expression— ”The Health of Nations is the Wealth of Nations.” And we both acknowledge our debt to Adam Smith. I have come to the firm conclusion that this is not just an attractive aphorism, but represents a relationship that is becoming more and more evident, and problems like those of AIDS are pointing even more sharply to the truth and validity of the relationship. I am Director of the Pan American Health Organization, the oldest international health organization in the world. We will be 100 years old in 2002. It is a matter of constant amazement to me that our founding fathers saw the wider dimensions of health, and in our infancy saw the relationship between health and economic growth. It was 75 years ago this month that the representatives of the Presidents of the Countries of the Americas signed the Sanitary Code which is the formal treaty that established our Office. The Sanitary Code states clearly that we should see that