ABSTRACT
The poorer Third World, also known as ‘low-income economies’ and ‘least developed countries’ (referred to here as LDCs), includes nearly all nations in sub-Saharan Africa, many countries in South and South-east Asia, China, India, and Haiti and Guyana in Latin America. But the world’s least developed areas, which are characterized by the highest incidence of preventable communicable diseases and malnutrition, also include numerous impoverished areas and communities within middle-income and high-income countries, such as the Bantustans and black ghettos in South Africa, many rapidly growing city slums and socially and economically marginalized populations, including the Australian Aborigines, South American indigenous peoples, peoples in polar areas, many pastoral nomads, low castes, refugees and other displaced groups (Swedlund and Armelagos 1991). According to the World Bank, including China and India, 3.1 billion of the world’s 5.5 billion people in 1990 lived in the forty-three low-income countries with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $610 or less. These countries constitute a large variety of physical and biotic environments inhabited by similarly diverse racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups and political institutions, all of which interact to produce a multitude of health and disease states that are only gradually being comprehended (Polednak 1989).
