Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program’s “New Security Beat”: Free Lunch: The Development Argument for Taking Zika More Seriously
Alaka M. Basu, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a professor of development sociology at Cornell University, discusses multiple potential public health and development benefits that could arise from a coordinated response to Zika virus. She writes, “On all these matters — water and sanitation, vector-borne illnesses, gastrointestinal disease, contraceptive access, the ability to demand safe sex — it is the poor, the rural, the young, the female, and the indigenous that suffer the most. As they do in their risk of exposure to Zika itself. If we believe inequalities in health care are unjust (and all the SDGs stress the need to reduce inequalities, especially SDG 10), then we are passing up more than one free lunch…” (5/16).