Mafalda, Malaria y este Mundo

A veces, al meditar sobre ciertas cosas que pasan a mi alrededor, me acuerdo de Mafalda, sobre todo cuando en una tira piensa, creo que de Felipe: "pobre, aún no se ha dado cuenta de que este mundo es este mundo”… y yo no es que no me haya dado cuenta, pero hay cosas que aún me siguen sacudiendo.

Leyendo una historia del intento de erradicación de la malaria me encuentro con esto:

“Now it is notoriously difficult to put a value on human life, though many economists are perennially willing to try. But the exercise becomes superficially plausible if you assume that development is the social objective, axiomatically to be considered good, by which other values are tested. Then the worth of a man may be reckoned as what he contributes during a normal life span to the gross national product. If he dies prematurely the years of useful labour cut off are lost and constitute a social cost. If he is periodically ill or chronically debilitated, his actual productivity falls short by a measurable amount of his assumed potential. And that is economic loss. All these costs may be charged to malaria if malaria is the villain, along with the direct expenses of treatment, and weighed against the cost of eliminating the disease or reducing it by any given amount.

If the model predicts that fighting disease pays, then the exercise can seen as harmless as it ought o seem superfluous. But suppose the fight is found not to pay. As the whole point of running a cost-benefit model is to sway governments presumed to be responsive to that kind of argument, would they not be under as strong pressure to forgo malaria control when the model lights turn red as to proceed when they are green?

Unpleasant as is that proffered choice, in the name of economic reason, to buy or not to buy lives, there is still a more unpleasant middle ground: To buy certain lives and sacrifice others. WHO has come perilously close to recommending that governments do just that. As a limited war against malaria by definition cannot extend to the protection of all people, a suggested strategy is to concentrate on protecting those people in society whose economic contributions are most important – workers in key industries, producers of cash crops, those who labour to build roads, dams and other capital improvements, in short all those who are useful for development.

This implies a curious and dismaying reversal of values. It used to be argued that development was a good thing because it benefited people; now we seem on the point of agreeing that people are a good thing so far as they benefit development. No one appears to have blushed at the implication that human life was to be protected only as it contributed to the gross national product. No politician appears to have protested the cynicism thus imputed to political leadership. Everyone is busy being “realistic”. If you want to do good in a world so obsessed with development that it allows only two kinds of nation, the developed and the developing, you have to prove that doing good is the way to develop.”

Gordon Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities since 1880.