Decades of neglect have left India’s public health system with a very weak arsenal to fight and eliminate contagious diseases The cholera epidemic in mid-nineteenth century London and the Spanish flu in the early part of the twentieth century made people and governments all over the world realize the importance of public health, wrote the economist and Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton in his 2013 book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.
The growing awareness that germs caused disease, and the consequent investments in public health systems involving sanitation and disease surveillance played a bigger role in improving life expectancy in the twentieth century than gains in income, Deaton noted.