Gadgetory

until recently the world was split in two and 1/2 virtually all children were vaccinated had sufficient nutrition and received proper treatment for common illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia the number of children in this half who died before they reach the age of 5 was well under 1% in the other half of the world about 15% of these children died before they turned 5 in some countries the percentage was even higher but the progress made in health care in the past 23 years indicate that we can improve child life expectancies bringing these two worlds into balance health is where we've spent the most money the majority of our work has been there part of that is is the upstream science inventing new vaccines and part of its been the down stream once you have those vaccines how do you get them out to all the world's children this system has had a tendency to get medicines to rich kicked or less at risk of hitting disease and not get them out to the kids who need it most and slowly but surely understanding cold-chain and measurement systems working with the countries that's getting a lot better we've worked with countries like Ethiopia have had a big commitment to get their healthcare system working we used a little bit of technology but just getting people to fill out the tally sheets having the people who do the deliveries take a photo of what the inventory currently looks like and getting those photos all collected up so you see very early on when things are going wrong we can get high performance even in in very poor countries some will be tough Niger's health systems not good Pakistan's is not good but we have people and our partners there applying the lessons of Rwanda and Ethiopia to those places we're raising the money so that the limited budgets of those countries don't block them from getting even the the very latest vaccine so one for diarrhea called rotavirus next five years we'll get out to all the kids one for respiratory disease called pneumococcus I will get out to all the kids and those two alone will save over half a million lives and that's why we think we can go from the 1 and 20 kids who died before the age of 5 15 years from now get that down to be one in 40 in 1980 smallpox was eradicated the first and only time in human history a disease was eradicated to say that destroying a disease is difficult is an understatement but it's neither impossible or impractical in 2030 polio and other major diseases elephantitis river blindness and blinding trachoma will be completely eradicated from the earth all these major breakthroughs give you a picture of how much progress we can make in the next 15 years life will get better faster because the number of innovations reaching the poor will be greater than ever before the world won't be split in two any longer