Attachment

» York Times by Nicholas Kristof. Nick reported that Infectious diseases--both the kind that turn into pandemics and the kind that don't--are something of an obsession for me. Unlike software or climate change, the subjects of my previous books, deadly infectious diseases are not generally something that people want to spend time on. (COVID-19 is the exception that proves the rule.) I've had to learn to temper my enthusiasm for talking about AIDS treatments and a malaria vaccine at parties. I could also be accused of seeking out the kind of parties where I won't have to temper my enthusiasm. My passion for the subject goes back almost twenty-five years, to January 1997, when Melinda and I read an article in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. Nick reported that diarrhea was killing 3.1 million people every year, almost all of them children.2 We were shocked. Three million kids a year! How could that many children be dying from something that was, as far as we knew, little more than an uncomfortable inconvenience? <~?~Insert art 001_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> This was when I was still reading the print edition and could cut out articles I wanted to share with others. We learned that the simple lifesaving treatment for diarrhea--an inexpensive liquid that replaces the nutrients lost during an episode--wasn't reaching millions of children. That seemed like a problem we could help with, and we started making grants to get the treatment out more broadly and to support work on a vaccine that would stop diarrheal diseases in the first place.* * Today about 500,000 children die of diarrheal diseases every year--still a horrific number, but a reduction of nearly 84 percent is real progress. A lot of this improvement is due to the development of cheap vaccines that prevent rotavirus, the main cause of childhood diarrhea.