Cash as medicine: How Brazil slashed TB by tackling poverty The scheme was launched to reduce poverty, but experts never anticipated the remarkable effects it would have on the country’s health.
In just over two decades, it has been credited with reducing new AIDS cases by over 40 per cent, cutting maternal mortality by 18 per cent, deaths from leprosy by 14 per cent, and preventing more than eight million hospitalisations.
Across Brazil, there are around 21 million other families in a similar situation, and they all receive monthly payments as part of the Bolsa Família scheme – one of the largest and longest-running conditional cash transfer programmes to be found anywhere.
Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), the Institute of Collective Health, and CIDACS-FIOCRUZ in Bahia, Brazil, analysed TB outcomes among 54 million low-income Brazilians.
Without money, you can’t prevent disease or benefit from the great outcomes we know are possible with modern medicine,” said Dr Miriam Laker-Oketta, Research Director at GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that sends cash to the mobile phones of poor families.
