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I'm not sure it's possible to describe to people now just how relieved and happy people were in the late 1950's when the first effective polio vaccine had been developed. The term "iron lung" has become archaic, but it was a real thing then. There were always pictures on TV and in the newspapers and magazines of kids confined to these beasts; to a parent it was a nightmare. (Most of that was advertising by the March of Dimes, to raise money to fund the research which created the vaccine to treat "infantile paralysis", the common name then for polio. The end result was good, of course, but it also terrified a lot of people. Not that they didn't have any right to be terrified, though; polio was and is a horrible disease.) As a kid I hated shots as much as any other, and it seemed as if every time I had to visit the doctor one of the things they had to do was to stick a needle in my butt. Whenever I had to visit my pediatrician, I'd always ask him, apprehensively, with a bit of a fearful quaver in my voice, "Am I gonna have to have a shot this time?" At least once he told me no, and I was a happy little kid. Stupid business; adults just want to hurt me. I think I did know why they were doing it and understood that it was for my own good, but a six year old kid doesn't worry about long term problems, and to me "diptheria" was just a word. I just knew that needles hurt, and having to uncover my butt was embarrassing. For my generation there were no vaccines for measles or mumps; those came later. So I had all four kinds of measles, and I had mumps. In fact, when I was a kid, one time I was taken to spend an afternoon playing with another kid who had Rubella, in hopes that I'd catch it. (I didn't, but I got it later.) Rubella ("German Measles") was the most feared of the lesser infections because of its potential to cause birth defects if gotten by a pregnant woman. But I got vaccinated against tetanus, and diptheria, and smallpox (which was one of the routine vaccinations then) and, by damn, against polio. In the Third World, these diseases are still major killers. They can be prevented but they are not being prevented. Smallpox has now been eradicated, and good riddance. Polio is dramatically down, also a good thing. But a lot of other preventable diseases ravage the Third World and millions of children die every year from diseases which are but a distant memory in the US. That's got to change. So the man everyone loves to hate, Bill Gates, is doing something about it. Melinda seems to have been a good influence on him and this is something she cares about deeply. And over the course of several years, the Gates family has created the single largest philanthropic foundation on earth, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It currently has assets in the range of $15 billion dollars, and Gates expects to add even more funds later. It gives money for a lot of things but childhood vaccination in poor nations is probably its biggest mission and it has been spending mammoth amounts on that. No half measures here; in 1999 alone the foundation spent $750 million to set up the Global Fund for Children's Vaccines. And that's not the only money the foundation has spent. And now its goal is nothing less than to immunize thirteen million children per year in the world's poorest nations for hepatitus, tetanus and diptheria. The goal is to vaccinate every young child in poor areas of south-east Asia within five years. These are particularly good choices because all three diseases are common and lethal and the vaccines for each are cheap, easy to manufacture, extremely safe and very well understood. The "bang-per-buck" ratio for this will be extremely high. Untold amounts of suffering and misery and grief are going to be prevented. (Measles and mumps are even more widespread but are far less dangerous.) There's a trap, though. In parts of Africa, vaccination programs have sometimes gone horribly wrong, and have killed more kids than have been saved. This is because hypodermic needles are expensive, and so they get reused. And in some cases they are inadequately sterilized, so they actually become a vector for spread of HIV, hepatitus, malaria, yellow fever and other blood-borne diseases. If a kid infected with hepatitus is vaccinated for polio, the next ten kids vaccinated with the same needle will be exposed to hepatitus and some of them will ultimately die from it. This new program is going to have to be carefully monitored t 
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