Tuesday, June 06, 2023
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It's a sad and true fact that a person's life expectancy is pretty much determined by where they live in the world. Take a child in the poorest part of the developing world: that child is 17 times more likely to die under the age of 5 as one born here, and its mother is 100 times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth. And if your home is in Canada, the US or Germany, you can expect to live into your 80's.
But if your home is Swaziland, Mozambique or Zambia, your life expectancy is half of that. Is that fair? Of course not, but the real question is 'what can we do about it'? Two award-winning doctors - Dr. Abdallah Daar & Dr. Peter Singer - have been working together for over a decade to bridge the atrocious global health gap... getting support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Canadian federal government for their organization called Grand Challenges Canada.
They've made it their mission to fund local ideas for inventions that could improve community health, and research some controversial ideas (like tweaking the DNA of mosquitoes to stop them from spreading malaria). But how do you take that knowledge out of the lab, and into the hands of those who need it most? For Daar & Singer, their goal is clear: to match the life expectancies of children born in Africa to those born in Canada. It's all laid out in their new book - 'The Grandest Challenge: Taking Life-Saving Science from Lab to Village'.
Check out the rest of this week's guests right here.
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