WTF? You don't think that cheaper technologies are going to be available to other countries?
How much do we spend on cancer in the US alone? It's astronomical. If a simple blood test can catch it faster, that's going to save us a bunch of money, and increase productivity (people living longer). Why would this not also benefit third-world nations? It'll probably have a bigger effect there because instead of people dying because they can't afford expensive treatments for later-stage cancers, they'll be able to get cheap treatments early on and live.
This complaint of yours sounds like someone in 2006 saying "we shouldn't have these smartphones because people in poorer countries can't afford them, and it'll give us too many productivity and economic advantages over them". Meanwhile, here in 2015, everyone and his brother in India and China has a smartphone, and in fact third-world nations in general have done a much better job of pushing cellular technology to the masses than the US has, thanks to our telecom cartel which keeps service plan prices absurdly high.
I'm sorry I didn't mean to offend. My comment was not meant as a complaint, or a statement of fact, but as wild speculation. It was my hope that by voicing such wild speculation I'd learn something, and I have.
In no way do I think it's a bad idea to seek better medical treatments ever, I just worried that it might further the gap between the haves and the have nots. If one solution creates another problem sometimes best solution can be to fix the new problem.
Sorry if I was a bit harsh, but it just seemed to me that your comment seemed a bit like some schools of thought which basically amount to "no one should have any advantages over anyone else because it's not fair, so we should handicap everyone to the same level", but with nations instead of individuals. Or maybe "we shouldn't implement any new technologies until we can make them equally available to everyone worldwide".
The thing is, if you look at new technologies, they've revolutionized things not only here in first-world nations, but in thirld-world nations too. Phones are a prime example of this: a few decades ago, there were lots of 3rd-world nations where they didn't have widely-deployed telephones. The US and Europe had them of course, because they had spend oodles of money over many decades installing twisted-pair copper lines everywhere, giving us 1950s-level phone tech. Then along came cellphones, and they were expensive at first, so only businesspeople (like realtors) and rich people bothered to pay for them. Should the US have held back deploying cellular infrastructure, in order to wait for the 3rd world countries to deploy basic twisted-pair POTS? Heck no. Because after a decade or so, the costs came down so much and phones got so cheap that the 3rd-world nations just went ahead and installed cell towers everywhere, and skipped landlines altogether. There's a lot of 3rd-world nations with better cellular coverage than a lot of places in America! It's a lot cheaper to install a cell tower to service hundreds of people than it is to install twisted-pair wiring to hundreds of homes, so that's exactly what they did: they took advantage of superior and less-expensive technology to catch up with the developed nations faster. It would have been stupid and wasteful for them to deploy the older POTS technology.
It's like that with all technologies: costs get driven farther and farther down, and people in developing nations are able to take advantage of that, so those economies are improving rapidly, and the quality of life in those nations is rising greatly.
The way I see it, this "gap between the haves and the have nots" is not a problem, and doesn't even exist, if you're looking at a worldwide scale. It is a problem here in the US because things are so corrupt and broken, but that's an entirely separate issue. For the most part, things are improving a lot for people in developing nations, with some obvious exceptions in the Middle East.
How much do we spend on cancer in the US alone? It's astronomical. If a simple blood test can catch it faster, that's going to save us a bunch of money, and increase productivity (people living longer). Why would this not also benefit third-world nations? It'll probably have a bigger effect there because instead of people dying because they can't afford expensive treatments for later-stage cancers, they'll be able to get cheap treatments early on and live.
This complaint of yours sounds like someone in 2006 saying "we shouldn't have these smartphones because people in poorer countries can't afford them, and it'll give us too many productivity and economic advantages over them". Meanwhile, here in 2015, everyone and his brother in India and China has a smartphone, and in fact third-world nations in general have done a much better job of pushing cellular technology to the masses than the US has, thanks to our telecom cartel which keeps service plan prices absurdly high.