Bill Gates--the most super-empowered individual working the Gap
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 11:06PM 
OPINION: "A New Initiative to Feed the World," by Timothy Geithner and Bill Gates, Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2010.FRONT PAGE: "Gates Rethinks His War on Polio," by Robert A. Guth, Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2010.
Gates, beyond all his ongoing focus on early childhood disease, now targets a second-generation Green Revolution for the Gap. His logic: population growth + global warming + water shortages + extant food insecurity put a lot of people at risk inside my Gap.
That one is my current favorite slide in the brief.
The proposed venture, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, started as a G8/20 idea. The World Bank will host and provide financing to low-income countries with all the usual goals.
Meanwhile, Gates is rethinking his polio approach, after seeing it resurge in various places following a 2-decade, $8.2B effort to eradicate it for good.
Cool interactive graphics at WSJ show how polio was spread pretty much everywhere in the world in 1980--save NorthAm, WestEu and Australia/NZ. 52k cases back then.
In 2009, only 1,733 cases, so plenty of progress. Plus, it's basically all located in the central belt of Africa, plus Af-Pak and India. But since polio travels in water and shows up--in terms of paralysis--in only 1 out of every 200 infected cases, you have to vaccinate widely in response to any outbreak.
That's how we defeated it in the West--super-aggressively once the vaccines were in hand.
That's always been geek-Gates' focus, and it's a good one. As the article points out, though, vaccines only get you so far in many local settings.
God bless the man for doing something truly useful with all that money--and his life, after doing so much to improve our planet's economy. Shows what a difference the right one individual can make.
Reader Comments (2)
Bill Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Muhammad Yunus ~ but a few of the "heroes" you predicted would rise up as globalization unfolds. I wonder why we don't hear more about what these people are doing in the news? If we heard more about them, more heroes might be inspired to rise up.