Jeffrey Sachs is a macroeconomist by training, an expert in the vagaries of business cycles and international finance. But give the man l0 minutes onstage, and a scholarly symposium starts to feel like a revival meeting. "Let me take you to Malawi," he urges a typical audience, leaning into the microphone and lowering his voice. Like most countries in southern Africa, Malawi has Seen ravaged by AIDS for two decades. One adult in seven is HIV-positive, and some 2 million children have been orphaned. But instead of hurling numbers at his listeners, Sachs transports them to Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, a site he visited this year while traveling with the rock star Bono.At one end of the facility is a small outpatient clinic where people who can pay $1 a day receive life-sustaining AIDS drugs. "They take the medicine and they get better," Sachs declares. "They return to work. They go back to care for their children." Unfortunately, $1 a day is nearly twice what a typical Malawian lives on. So most AIDS patients end up in wards like the one just down the hall from the outpatient clinic. "ladies and gentlemen", Sachs tells the now hushed hall, "this plague is exploding. Its consequences will make the world quake. Rich countries could stop the devastation. And most are still looking away."Sachs is not the first to sound this alarm, but he speaks with special authority. As the newly appointed director of Columbia University"s Earth Institute, he heads a huge, interdisciplinary effort to help poor countries build sustainable economies. Instead of treating climate change, epidemic disease and social upheaval as distinct phenomena, the institute"s 800 scientists study the links among such problems—and work to translate their insights into action. Sachs also chairs blue-ribbon panels for the World Health Organization, advises U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on development issues and circles the globe pleading with policymakers to support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. In the coming year he"ll help seed new treatment-and-prevention programs throughout Asia and Africa.From Sachs"s perspective, controlling AIDS is not only a moral imperative but also a practical necessity. As he is forever trying to convince political leaders, disease can perpetuate poverty, ruin economies and undermine civic order. As a Sachs-led WHO commission concluded last year, "The burden of disease in some low-income regions...stands as a barrier to economic growth and must be addressed frontally and centrally in any comprehensive development strategy." As a group, the world"s richest countries now spend just $6 billion a year in health-related development assistance. The Sachs commission concluded that by raising the commitment to $27 billion by 2007 and $38 billion by 2015, we would save 8 million lives every year while improving a third of the world"s prospects for prosperity.Jeffrey Sachs is now devoted to A．the training of macroeconomists.B．international finance.C．symposiums and conferences.D．the fund raising work for poor countries.
