The tide in public health and medicine has started to shift. The global HIV/AIDS crisis brought into sharp relief the vulnerability of financially strapped health systems to epidemic disease and revealed disparities in health outcomes along economic fault lines. The protestations of injustice regarding the withholding of life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment from the developing world, made first by patient-activists, then students, and (more gradually) academics and politicians, have provided a template for addressing other diseases linked to poverty. This hope was echoed in the preface of Farmer's 1 AIDS and Accusation: "If AIDS care becomes a right rather than a commodity.we have no more excuses for ignoring the growing inequality that has left hundreds of millions of people without any hope of surviving preventable and treatable illnesses.Taking on AIDS forcefully would allow us to start a 'virtuous social cycle,' long overdue." And if a rights-based approach to controlling communicable disease falls on deaf ears, enlightened self-interest might still invoke concern. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), multidrug-resistant TB, and H1N1 remind the developed world of its porous borders. Many investors view the developing world as a potential market for their goods, and military strategists foresee the danger of allowing states to collapse from pandemic disease.