A new study, published Dec. 27 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, finds that vector-borne（媒介传播的） and parasitic¹ diseases have substantial effects on economic development across the globe, and are major drivers of differences in income between tropical and temperate²（温和的） countries. The burden of these diseases is, in turn, determined³ by underlying⁴ ecological⁵ factors: it is predicted to rise as biodiversity falls. This has significant implications for the economics of health care policy in developing countries, and advances our understanding of how ecological conditions can affect economic growth. According to conventional economic wisdom, the foundation of economic growth is in political and economic institutions. "This is largely Cold War Economics about how to allocate⁶（分配） property rights -- with the government or with the private sector," says Dr Matthew Bonds, an economist⁷ at Harvard Medical School, and the lead author of the new study. However, Dr Bonds and colleagues were interested instead in biological processes that transcend⁸ such institutions, and which might form a more fundamental economic foundation.

 

The team was intrigued⁹ by the fact that tropical countries are generally composed of poor agrarian¹⁰（耕地的） populations while countries in temperate regions are wealthier and more industrialized. This distribution of income is inversely¹¹（相反得） related to the burden of disease, which peaks at the equator and falls along a latitudinal¹² gradient（纬度）. Although it is common to conclude that economics drives the pattern of disease, the authors point out that most of the diseases that afflict¹³ the poor spend much of their life-cycle outside the human host. Many cannot even survive outside the tropics. Their distribution is largely determined by ecological factors, such as temperature, rainfall, and soil quality.

 

Because of the high correlations¹⁴ between poverty and disease, determining the effects of one on the other was the central challenge of their statistical¹⁵ analysis. Most previous attempts to address this topic ignored disease ecology, argue Bonds and colleagues. The team assembled a large data set for all of the world's nations on economics, parasitic and infectious vector-borne diseases, biodiversity (mammals, birds and plants) and other factors. Knowing that diseases are partly determined by ecology, they used a powerful set of statistical methods, new to macroecology（宏观生态学）, that allowed variables that may have underlying relationships with each other to be teased apart.

 

The results of the analysis suggest that infectious disease has as powerful an effect on a nation's economic health as governance, say the authors. "The main asset of the poor is their own labor," says Dr Bonds. "Infectious diseases, which are regulated by the environment, systematically¹⁶ steal human resources. Economically speaking, the effect is similar to that of crime or government corruption¹⁷ on undermining economic growth."

 

This result has important significance for international aid organizations, as it suggests that money spent on combating disease would also stimulate¹⁸ economic growth. Moreover, although diversity of human diseases is highly correlated with diversity of surrounding species, the study indicates that the burden of such human disease actually drops when biodiversity rises. The analysis is inconclusive about why this effect is so strong. The authors suggest that competition and predation limit the survival of disease vectors and free-living parasites¹⁹ where biodiversity is high. The research sets the stage for a number of future analyses that need to lay bare the relationship between health care funding and economic development.

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