Health and Wealth

Abstract Africa’s current 1 billion or so residents are healthier than they have ever been thanks to medical science, special attention in several key countries to chronic disease remediation, and the efforts of several American philanthropic enterprises. Life expectancies are up and morbidity is mostly down, allowing Africans to work more productively, enjoy more leisure, and exert middle class pressures on their respective national governments. Daily life has become a little less brutish in a Hobbesian manner than it once was. There is more space and time now for the cultivation of progress socially, economically, and politically. But children still die in great number from pneumonia, tuberculosis is rife, HIV/AIDS persists, and malaria has not yet been eradicated. So Africans are still at risk.