AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.

F. 2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. PMID 3762700.

Originally trained in physiology Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields including anthropology ecology geography and evolutionary biology. He is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles.