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Ruth Levine and the What Works Working Group, Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health. Washington: Center for Global Development, 2004 180 pp. in paper cover (available at www.cdgev.org).
"AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis kill 6 million people each year in developing countries, and another 7 million children die of infectious diseases that have long been forgotten in the rich world... Does anything really work to solve profound health problems that face poor countries? Does development assistance from rich countries make any difference at all?" So asks Nancy Birdsall, the President of the Center for Global Development, in her preface to Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health. The answer, 17 times over, is a resounding, yes.
Millions Saved chronicles 17 successful public health initiatives from all over the globe. The book, a publication from the Center for Global Development, is authored by Ruth Levine and the "What Works Working Group" (a panel of 15 experts in global health, public policy and development economics). While each chapter tells a compelling story, equally compelling is the work and intellectual capital of the "What Works Working Group." This book and their work holds promise for political leaders, policy-makers, practitioners, and millions of people's lives all over the globe.
To find these large-scale successes in international health, the CGD collaborated with the Disease Control Priorities Project at the National Institutes of Health. The programs selected for inclusion met the following criteria: they had to be ambitious in scale nationwide or larger; they had to have had a major positive impact on health; the improvement clearly had to be due to the public-health intervention; they had to produce strong results for at least 5 years; and they had to be cost-effective.
Levine and her colleagues present each case study in a separate chapter but they also tease out the common threads of success. Each study also provides a "behind the scenes" glimpse at the players, personalities, and complexities of these large scale, mostly multipartner initiatives.
Fittingly, the book launches with the story of the eradication of small pox - arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind and public health. The scope of the 17 studies range from preventing river blindness in n countries in sub-Saharan Africa, to controlling trachoma...