ABSTRACT
These words spoken by a man in Ghana show just how intimately poverty and ill health are linked together. Every year, 9.2 million children die before the age of 5; two-thirds of these deaths, 6 million, are preventable.2 The leading causes of childhood deaths – pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and measles – are easily prevented with a few basic things such as clean water, insecticide-treated bed nets, oral rehydration and immunisations. All these diseases can be linked back to poverty.
