Less‐developed countries are ahead of developed countries in several areas of policy analysis. One is health. Analysts, and increasingly practitioners, are accepting that returns to spending on preventive medicine—better nutrition, drinking‐water, control of insect pests, etc.—are usually both higher and better‐distributed than are the returns to formal curative outlays. Moreover, the growth process alone does not solve the problem In some ways, growth maldistributes health. As the rich get richer, they improve their personal health environments ; as the poor get less poor, they often switch their babies from clean breast‐milk to convenient but unhygienically prepared formula foods, and themselves from active (if hard) lifestyles to stressful, sedentary and cigarette‐ridden ones. At a turning‐point in Britain, a future Health Minister might adopt this analysis here too. Major switches in incentives, health spending and general social policy would disarm Britain's major killers : cars, cigarettes, cholesterol. Targets could be set for reductions in death‐rates and morbidity. The recognition that the role of government lies at least as much in micro‐policy for welfare as in aggregate planning for growth; the need to confront interests both with rational debate and with opposing interests; the prospects for non‐marginal transformations by interdisciplinary inter‐ministered actions in a traditionally specialised policy area : these are among the lessons that the health experience of the Third World has for Britain. They extend far beyond the health area.