The Role of Health Today in Social and Economic Development

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Abstract
Eradication is defined as the final step in a sequence of increasingly complete actions: control, elimination, eradication, and requires extirpation of the agent in a defined geographic area. The difficulty and expense of this final step and the possible ecological disturbances created by the process demand special reasons for its adoption in preference to measures leading to elimination or control. Although economic reasons have been advanced they are not readily substantiated and biological reasons such as disease severity, difficulty of its detection, potential failure of control from biological adaptations, or severity of complications of control measures, should be given greater weight. Diseases caused by man''s own interference with his environment are specially suitable for eradication. At present malaria, cholera and smallpox demand eradication if it can be achieved. The argument that a policy of eradication, if successful, will aggravate the population problem is discounted since present population trends began long before eradication was even considered. However, less dramatic but highly effective control measures must not be subordinated to the immediate appeal of the concept of eradication without careful examination. Progress in the health and economic fields are interdependent and activities in both directions must be balanced.

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