The global organisation charged with securing financial stability and reducing poverty could be bad for your health.
The International Monetary Fund lends money to countries with financial problems and in return requires them to cut spending to control inflation. Critics have long charged that this in fact reduces spending on healthcare and so promotes the spread of disease.
Now David Stuckler and colleagues at the University of Cambridge have analysed the spread of tuberculosis in 21 countries in central and eastern Europe that received IMF loans after 1989. The countries started with a TB mortality rate of 6 per…
