Bill Gates' Vaccination Campaigns

choi

Bill Gates, My Plan to Fix the World's Biggest Problem.*  *Measure Them!  Wall Street Journal, Jan 26, 2013.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 61780648285770.html

(a) Excerpt in the window of print:
(i) From the fight against polio to fixing education, what's missing is often good measurement and a commitment to follow the data. We can do better. We have the tools at hand.
(ii) In Nigeria, small settlemenets were missing from hand-drawn maps. Now satellite imaging and GPS are saving lives.

(b) Data in the window of print:
(i) 222  Polio cases in 2012 world-wide, down from 350,000 in 1988
(ii) 83%  Children wold-wide who received three doses of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertusis vaccine in 2011, up from 17% in 1980

(c) the first four paragraphs:

"WE CAN LEARN A LOT about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.

"Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.' Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the 'Lord Chancellor' that could gauge tiny distances.

"Such measuring tools, Mr Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr Rosen writes, invention is 'doomed to be rare and erratic.' With it, invention becomes 'commonplace.'

"In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr Rosen describes.


(d) My comment:
(i) There is no need to read the rest of the article.
(ii) The thesis of the article can be summarized in the first three paragraphs. Vaccination is one of the pet projects of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (The article says, "There are now just three countries that have not eliminated polio: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan"). But Mr Gates soon turns to education, where measurements of success are more elusive.
(iii) William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World; A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention. University Of Chicago Press, 2012.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/bo ... o/M/bo13182912.html

(iv) Regarding Excerpt (ii). Mr Gates explains in three paragraphs of the text:

"I visited northern Nigeria four years ago to try to understand why eradication is so difficult there. I saw that routine public health services were failing: Fewer than half the kids were getting vaccines regularly. One huge problem was that many small settlements in the region were missing from vaccinators' hand-drawn maps and lists documenting the locations of villages and numbers of children.

"To fix this, the polio workers walked through all high-risk areas in the northern part of the country, which enabled them to add 3,000 previously overlooked communities to the immunization campaigns. The program is also using high-resolution satellite images to create even more detailed maps. As a result, managers can now allocate vaccinators efficiently.

"What's more, the program is piloting the use of phones equipped with a GPS application for the vaccinators. Tracks are downloaded from the phone at the end of the day so managers can see the route the vaccinators followed and compare it to the route they were assigned. This helps ensure that areas that were missed can be revisited.

(v) Humans are the only natural hosts for polioviruses. In other words, no other animals (sickened or not) serve as reservoirs. Once eliminated from the world, it will not come back (except in biological warfare), making further vaccination unnecessary. For the same reason, smallpox was eliminated.
(A) smallpox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
("After vaccination campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in 1979. Smallpox is one of two infectious diseases to have been eradicated, the other being rinderpest, which was declared eradicated in 2011")
(B) rinderpest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
(The term Rinderpest is a German word meaning "cattle-plague")
does not infect humans.

* The rinderpest, being of German origin, has the "i" pronounced like that of English pronoun "it."
* rinder (n): "cattle"
* In compound noun, see English compound
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound
(as in rinderpest), the "rinder" is translated in English as "bovine."
* The "rinder" is the plural form of German noun neuter "rind" which means either "cow" or "bull."
* pest (noun feminine): "plaque"