Gates Package — page 940

In most rich countries, it is hard to be born or die without the government's recording it--the odds are high that the event will be entered into a birth or death registry. But in many low- and middle-income countries, that's not the case. Many of them measure births and deaths using household surveys that are held several years apart, which means they only know statistics about deaths and births within some error range, such as plus or minus 5 percent.. According to the WHO, only 44 percent of children born in Africa show up in their government's registry. (In Europe and America, more than 90 percent do.) In low-income countries, just one out of every ten deaths is recorded by the government, and only a tiny fraction of those records includes a cause of death. Given the challenge of recording major life events, it is hardly surprising that many cases of illness go undetected too. At the end of October 2021, estimates showed that about 15 percent of COVID infections worldwide were being detected. In Europe, the rate was 37 percent, but in Africa, it was only one percent. With so little precision, and with samples being taken only every few years, the deaths statistics won't help us detect an epidemic at all in those countries.. When I first got involved in global health, around 10 million children under the age of five were dying every year, the vast majority of them in low- and middle-income countries. That number was heartbreaking on its own, but even worse, the world knew shockingly little about why these children died. Official reports would show a huge percentage of deaths that was simply labeled "diarrhea," but lots of pathogens and conditions can cause diarrhea, and since nobody knew for certain which ones were the main causes of child mortality, it was nearly impossible to find a solution. Over time, the Gates Foundation and other organizations funded studies that pointed to rotavirus as a major cause, and researchers were able to develop an affordable rotavirus vaccine that saves the lives of nearly 30,000 children every year.3