Our NHS spends £90 per person a year, and is still very short of money. Tanzania can only afford £1, and their problems are much worse than ours: half the children die before the age of five. Tanzania is halfway through pioneering its own health system - which rejects Western concepts of medicine. Peasants with six months' training treat tropical ulcers and malaria; men after a simple three-year course cure pneumonia and bilharzia with the same competence as doctors.
If the system works, it promises a way of overcoming ill-health in the Third World. For us in the West, too. it may mean a radical rethink about the role of doctors and hospitals.
Written and produced by EDWARD GOLDWIN
