Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2014

by prajjwal • 12 years ago

656 114 12 years ago

It's so cool to see the eradication of a disease. To live through it. You read about such things in history books, but actually being alive while it happens is pretty sweet. Especially such an awful one like polio.

philwelch3• 12 years ago

They'll have to eradicate it in Pakistan and Afghanistan first, and around there people don't really trust foreigners who come around promising free polio vaccines because that was the CIA's cover when they came looking for Bin Laden.

danieltillett4• 12 years ago

Yep. The stupidity involved in this decision is breathtaking.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Those areas did not trust foreigners with needles to begin with. The CIA vaccination gambit was undeniably stupid, but it wasn't a root cause, it made a bad problem worse.

The root cause is that those are areas with very high levels of tribal paranoia, religious fundamentalism, and outright violence.

tanzam755• 12 years ago

There was a polio outbreak in China in 2011 that was traced back to Pakistan. Prior to that outbreak, the last case of polio in China had been in 1999.

The outbreak was contained after 21 confirmed infections plus another 23 suspected. The Chinese public health system mobilized 1000 health workers, spent $26 million, and vaccinated 44 million people.

If we can't get rid of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then this will just keep happening.

NEJM editorial: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1311591

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

The news about better treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis is huge. If confirmed, that'll be the basis for saving many lives in the next decade, especially in India. Multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis has been an alarming problem there.[1]

[1] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...

http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420457...

http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...

jsankey2• 12 years ago

Agreed. Living in the age of antibiotics we (in the developed world) have quickly forgotten how deadly TB is (it was a leading cause of death just 100 years ago). Given the difficulty in developing new antibiotics (and relative lack of commercial incentive to do so) the news that they've found a more effective new drug combination (including new drugs) is very welcome.

The fact that the regimen is shorter will hopefully mean higher completion rates: a big issue at the moment as the treatment can take up to 2 years leading many patients to take incomplete courses (and of course this fuels drug resistance). In Australia we're lucky enough to have the resources to provide free treatment with mandatory monitoring by health care workers (to enforce the full course is taken), but in India, PNG etc they desperately need a cheaper and more practical solution.

Edit to add: hopefully new drugs will also help those with sensitivity to the current antibiotics. They have some pretty harsh side effects, e.g. drug-induced hepatitis is a common problem which means many patients can't tolerate the preferred regimen.

melling• 12 years ago

Isn't the problem of drug resistance made-made?

http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/en/

In India, in particular, anyone can buy antibiotics, and they do, whether they need them or not. This problem should probably be addressed before we create a problem that we can't solve.

jared314• 12 years ago

This problem should probably be addressed before we create a problem that we can't solve.

That still leaves the nasty issue of what to do with the large number of people who have contracted a highly contagious and drug-resistant / incurable disease.

jsankey2• 12 years ago

Yes, the problem is man made, but not only due to unofficial access to antibiotics. I suspect that's not even a major factor, but correct me if I've missed something.

As discussed: TB currently takes a long time to fully treat. A lot of patients can't afford a full course of the recommended combination of drugs. Even if they can, and are getting their drugs from official channels, they need to be monitored regularly (sometimes daily) to ensure proper treatment. The resources to do this monitoring simply don't exist in India (and many other countries). Thus, even if you could stop all unofficial access to antibiotics (impossible in practice), there is simply not enough funding to ensure every patient is properly treated.

This is why a shorter regimen is a key breakthrough. It makes proper treatment much more accessible (the big issue), while also reducing the discipline needed to complete a course (a small bonus).

IndianAstronaut• 12 years ago

The drug resistant tuberculosis is already here so we have to solve it.

But to prevent future problems, people need to stop using antibiotics as a cure all. It is particularly bad in India since patients there can aggressively demand antibiotics from hospitals and doctors.

wahsd• 12 years ago

Serious question though, and I would like people to ignore some sort of moral or religious argument for it; but what is the long term implication if all kinds of health advances save people but humans still reproduce and impact the planet in already unsustainable rates.

I get it, some people have a bleeding heart and want to save everyone, everywhere, at all times; but what happens when the planet is the equivalent of a cat hoarder's house because we could never say no and we could never implement policy to limit population growth because the wealthy inherently gain from unregulated population growth?

octaveguin• 12 years ago

Gates actually addressed this[0].

The upshot is that as countries get richer, fertility rates decrease. Allowing these poorer countries to lead better lives will paradoxically lower the population increase. If you look at the western world, negating immigration, many countries have a shrinking population.

The more pressing problem of the future, ironically, will be under population - at least if you consider the economic impact and our way of life. Our economy right now is built on so much growth and young labor. What happens without poor countries and when more people are retired than working?

[0]http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#myth-three=&section...

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

Paradoxically, reducing death rates in the young actually slows population growth. One of the biggest reasons why people in poor countries have so many babies is because so many die young.

dharmach• 12 years ago

It is about the resource consumption, not just population number. If a species X has population 10 times than species Y but if Y consumes 100 times more then they will cause larger impact to the earth.

quadrangle• 12 years ago

I had these thoughts too. They are actually very wrong, as I learned from the great Hans Rosling: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...

cmsmith• 12 years ago

In the first place it's pretty hard to ignore the moral argument. If moral arguments are out, and we accept the thesis that population is bad, then it's hard to see why purposefully letting people suffer and die from TB is any better than using nuclear bombs to reduce the global population.

But anyways, if we want to get around to a sustainable post-scarcity futuristic utopia, we need a global population of economically developed and educated people with replacement-level fertility. And when childhood mortality goes down, parents have an incentive to concentrate their investments (both economic and educational) into fewer children. Those children will be more successful, have better access and education about contraception, and won't need to have plenty of children to provide manual labor on their farm.

Anyways, that's how it's supposed to work, and has worked many times in recent history. I put less stock than others in the extrapolated results from the recent UN Africa study.

habith• 12 years ago

Serious question though, and I would like people to ignore some sort of moral or religious argument for it; but what is the long term implication if all kinds of health advances save people but humans still reproduce and impact the planet in already unsustainable rates.
I get it, some people have a bleeding heart and want to save everyone, everywhere, at all times; but what happens when the planet is the equivalent of a cat hoarder's house because we could never say no and we could never implement policy to limit population growth because the wealthy inherently gain from unregulated population growth?

Some of the minds saved can one day solve these and other problems, pushing the envelope of human knowledge.

IkmoIkmo2• 12 years ago

Strangely it's kind of the other way around. When you have a poor, unhealthy population with labor-intensive economy, high child mortality and low life expectancy, you tend to get tons of people.

Why? Because it's economically smart to have children.

In a labor-intensive economy, you can generate more income in the family with more children.

And in a poor subsistence economy, there is no surplus wealth being generated to go to the state for redistribution and another thing I'll get to in a minute. This means that institutionally-provided social security is often non-existent (no pensions, no insurance, no universal healthcare, no benefits, food stamps etc). So instead of institutions, these services are provided by the community, i.e. children. If you have 5 kids, there's a much better chance of someone taking care of you at old age, or when you're sick, than if you have few or no kids.

You have more kids because there is a higher chance of death. Child mortality under five is absolutely STAGGERING. I literally think about this every week and wonder why we can't get the news to report on it on a weekly basis. The number is about 17 thousand per day. Try putting that into perspective. That's more than 5 times 9/11 per day, or 50% the death-rate in World War 2 year in year out. At these rates, it makes sense to have more children, parents actually expect not all their children to last.

When you take death and sickness out of a community however, there is much more chance of economic growth. There are loads of UN reports on how mortality and sickness affects education, employment, parenting, productivity etc. In short, if you improve these things significantly in a country, 10-20 years later you see millions of extra people pour into the middle class.

And what happens then? The truth is that it's economically disadvantageous to have children in a wealthy society. Children cost (way) more money than they generate. Wealthy societies have child-labor laws (well, every country does, but they're enforced more strictly), as well as laws that require all children to go to school. Standards of living in a wealthy society requires loads of expenses on children, and price levels aren't low either. And lastly we see that in wealthy societies that there is more wealth-surplus, leading to cultures that have the time and literally the money to explore non-economic interests, like the arts, and this often goes hand in hand with less time spent on simply surviving and taking care of family members, in fact leading to sharply reduced birthrates as new generations grow up with a bigger interest in traveling than raising a family. (extensive traveling for recreation being something almost only possible in wealthy societies with a wealth surplus, i.e. the minimum amount of work you need to do just to survive is something like 30% instead of 90%, so if you spend 60% of your time working you have a large wealth surplus and a lot of free time).

In short, having 10 children is the 'worst idea ever' for most parents both economically and culturally the richer a country gets.

What does this all mean? Well, if you believe me, we've established that it makes sense to have lots of children in a poor country, and very few in a rich country, which is easily seen in empirical data. (it's not a cultural thing, most western countries with low birthrates had very high birthrates before they became wealthy post industrial revolution). And we've also established that mortality and sickness are huge inhibitors of economic growth.

Lastly, I'd say that a richer society with less mortality and sickness is more stable, better educated, has better funded institutions, which means natural family planning (like contraception and sex education in best case, or authoritarian China-style 1-child policies in worst case) should also be much more effective.

In other words, in the long run, reducing death rates is actually likely to decrease the size of the population, with of course the added benefit that it's freaking awesome to save lives that every living person deserves to have. After all, none of us would volunteer to die just to be able to 'sustain the planet with a lower population'! :) But I tried to ignore this point for argument's sake.

The corollary to this story is that a wealthier society consumes much more, which is less sustainable. (e.g. 500 million people in China/India who join the middle class and turn to 'basic' items like toilet paper is like adding another Europe or US. It's insane.) The fun and optimistic corollary to that is adding 500 million educated brains, who knows how many nobel prize winners will be among them providing the solutions we need :)

keyle• 12 years ago

It's fantastic to see articles that focus on the positives. Most media and the press are all about the daily, the shocking and the hurtful. This is good news.

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

The irony is that the "news" often focuses on exceptional events, which tends to result in having a skewed view of the world.

protomyth• 12 years ago

If you haven't read "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News"[1] by Drew Curtis, then I highly recommend it to explain quite a lot of the process and thinking of the news. It might not be the most serious, and it is funny, but it digs into the truths of the beast.

1) http://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-News-Fark-Media/dp/1592403662/

revscat• 12 years ago

What the Gates Foundation is wonderful, laudable, noble, and good. I am disappointed to not see mention of any environmental accomplishments in the list, though. Long term, the threats posed by climate change are far more of a threat than any disease.

trothamel• 12 years ago

That doesn't seem to be true. According to the WHO, climate change has the potential to cause 250,000 deaths per year in 2030-2050. When it comes to disease, malaria alone kills between 376,000 and 755,000 people per year - right now.

Sources: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/premature-deaths-m... http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

danielharan• 12 years ago

As one noted in the article ""almost certainly an underestimate", because a number of climate-health relationships are not measurable due to lack of adequate data".

Milder winters expand the range of disease-carrying insects, increase risks of wars or famine with less water, mass migrations leading to political instability, more extreme weather events like draughts and flooding leading to failed crops and other natural catastrophes...

Meanwhile much of the WHO estimate is for people dying due to heat exposure. Easy to quantify, important to know - but nowhere near the full picture.

_nedR3• 12 years ago

There is good news on that front too. Malaria deaths worldwide have been halved in the past decade : http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30375202

mikeash2• 12 years ago

2030-2050 is still early days for climate change. The real fun is probably 2100 and beyond.

scrapcode• 12 years ago

From my culture, this is arguable. What Gates is displaying is concrete evidence of progress... What you're saying there isn't any mention of is still argumented largely on if it's a real threat, or not... If it is a real threat, it will take a LOT of change and human resources to correct. I think every bit of this is a step in the right direction. If humanity cannot survive with what they're presented with now, how can they with what they're presented with tomorrow?

tokenadult2• 12 years ago

Long term, the threats posed by climate change are far more of a threat than any disease.

As another reply has already noted, that seems incorrect even for just one disease that the Gates Foundation is working on eradicating. That would be even more incorrect with reference to "any" disease, meaning even diseases that are in the top five worldwide as causes of death. Most people will survive global climate change by adjusting to local weather, the same as most people long have done throughout human history. People in the Netherlands have already figured out how to live below sea level, people here in Minnesota have already figured out how to live in a place with wild annual extremes of temperature, and so on.

tonyedgecombe• 12 years ago

Are you saying rich countries can figure out how to deal with it so everything is OK?

pbreit• 12 years ago

On one hand, Bill himself seems to support rather strongly "energy miracles" [1] as well as some sort of carbon tax (he thinks certainty is important)[2]. But the Foundation notably does not address any carbon issues, instead looking for opportunities to provide aid where the climate is creating harm.[3]

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-roll...

3. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informatio...

philwelch3• 12 years ago

Be that as it may, Gates has the most leverage to solve the problems he does. Climate change is 80% a political problem. Convince the G-7 to pass carbon taxes or cap-and-trade and you've solved climate change. Anything less and you've probably failed. Contrary to rumor, money is not an effective means of effecting political change, outside of maybe a little bit of graft and corruption on the side.

_nedR3• 12 years ago

I am not a climate expert, but I think you're grossly downplaying the complexity of the climate change problem. There are so many factors in play. Its not just a matter of CO2 emissions. There is methane from animal livestock, contrails from aircraft, cloud cover, methane hyderates in the ocean, sunspot activity; Even the average reflectance of the earth's surface(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo). Every year the scientist's models and theories seems to be changing. All we seem to know for sure is that global average temperatures are indeed rising.

I have the sneaky (unscientific) suspicion that whatever drastic measures we would inevitably have to take to curb CO2 emissions is going to open its own can of worms. The footprint of human activity is simply that large.

willholloway• 12 years ago

Solar Photovoltaic panel prices have fallen 75% from where they were just four years ago. In giant swaths of the world solar is the cheapest form of new energy, cheaper than coal & natural gas.

This is the most important graph of this century:

http://fund-balance.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Solar-Mod...

It was made in 2012 when solar costs were $1 per watt. The Chinese solar industry has gotten the price down below .50 per watt this year.

Solar PV panels are going beyond grid parity. 70% of the power generated by a coal plant is wasted in the transmission line before it reaches your home. The data has spoken and solar has won.

I believe this is the development that will let us avoid run away catastrophic warming.

Humans are rational actors when presented with cost-based options. Politics, biases and ideology fall away when looking at price.

And ramping up and scaling production of high demand items and bringing cost down in the process is where modern capitalism shines ie. the relentless deflation in consumer technology (pcs, tablets, flat panel displays)

In order to avoid catastrophic warming we have to reduce emissions by something like 80% by 2050. That seemed a pipe dream before cheap solar panels, now it feels inevitable to me.

Cheap solar is the energy miracle Bill has been waiting for. I hope that he includes it in his 2015 post when solar is $.25-.40 per watt.

r00fus• 12 years ago

Humans are rational actors when presented with cost-based options. Politics, biases and ideology fall away when looking at price.

Really? Explain Verblen Goods[1].

Fact is, while price drops do help businesses, there are other complications with home solar - utility companies need to simplify net metering so I don't have to either go off-grid or calculate exactingly to prevent wasted collection. Install costs are also high. Furthermore, there are many houses with many natural gas appliances that reduce the benefits (you're still paying utilities for gas and likely a lot in winter).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

dergachev• 12 years ago

I would add they just came out with a drug to cure hepatitis C. That's amazing news for 3.2 million Americans with the disease, including my dad. http://www.webmd.com/hepatitis/news/20140729/pill-hepatitis-...

FunCaptcha_Jim• 12 years ago

Oh wow, I had no idea this happened! And it's actually true? This isn't the typical "we've cured this" then "loljk here's why we haven't cured this" news piece?

refurb10• 12 years ago

Yes it is true.

However, it's not like we couldn't cure hepatitis C before, we could, but just not very well.

The old regimen was interferon + ribavirin. You had to take it for months and months and the interferon makes you feel like you have the flu (it also put the patient at risk of depression and suicide). The cure rate was ~50%.

With the new drugs you don't need to get interferon injections anymore. You just pop one pill a day and 12 weeks later there is a 95%+ likelihood that you've been cured of HCV.

It's a HUGE medical advance.

toyg3• 12 years ago

I'm surprised not to see the usual contingent of malthusians out in force. We're saving more kids than ever; surely this means we're all doomed, right? BillG should spend all this money on sterilising (poor, non-white) people instead, right?

(ok, ok, this is a bit trollish, but my point stands: the world is getting better and the sky is not falling -- deal with it)

skrebbel• 12 years ago

Soo, you missed a trollish debate so you're trying to start it even though you don't agree with the presumed point which, in fact, nobody is making?

toyg3• 12 years ago

I didn't say malthusians are trollish, I admitted I was being trollish. I am just curious about why they're not trying to spin it in their usual fashion.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Sadly for you, we're second-order contrarians around here!

Non-contrarian: "Saving kids is good!"

First-order contrarian: "Malthusianism! Overpopulation! Blargh!"

Second-order contrarian: "Education leads to reduced population. People have fewer kids when they know child death is very rare."

Third-order contrarian: "Population collapse! End of growth! Blargh!"

Fourth-order contrarian: "We've dealt with worse and survived. Maybe space colonization will provide a positive impetus for population growth and a new engine for economic growth."

toyg3• 12 years ago

Well, it looks like the regular contrarians have finally caught on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8757464

DodgyEggplant• 12 years ago

This is a huge case, maybe rare, how money is better used than a tax payment. Non of this would happen if sunk into the government

gldalmaso• 12 years ago

Not sure I understand your point. These are all state tier achievements. If anything it's where the state is either disorganized, broke, utterly corrupt, or all that make it difficult to achieve those goals in the first place.

You are saying we shouldn't have to pay taxes so the state can plan and execute vaccine campaigns and offer chronic disease treatment without cost to the patients that need it?

This is the case in Brazil (for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Brazil) and I happily pay my due to make it happen.

Not all tax money is actually put to good use, but the greater part is and I certainly wouldn't advocate against that.

Of course some countries have weird priorities IMO (yes, US) and may not share this view.

jc1232• 12 years ago

Yes dodgy's point is probably that this tax money sent to US govt will not result in such achievements like medicine in developing countries.

tim_hutton2• 12 years ago

The numbers in the polio graph doesn't match the positions! Comparison: http://i.imgur.com/3kGXyRA.png

Not a massive problem in this case but worrying.

sp332• 12 years ago

All I'm seeing from the comparison is that your circles are a bit smaller than the original.

tim_hutton2• 12 years ago

The 122 in particular should be almost halfway between 100 and 150 but theirs is much lower.

LukeFitzpatrick2• 12 years ago

Hi Bill,

Just wanted to let you know you have a 'bug' on the 'contact us' section, I assume only for iOS devices. It comes up with a gray area blocking the forms, with the text out of place.

Great site, and it's good you're giving so much back to the world to fight worthy causes.

queeerkopf• 12 years ago

Curious side note/question: What makes you think Bill Gates or someone involved with the website reads the comments on this HN submission?

LukeFitzpatrick2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I thought the site posted was his official blog. I naturally thought he would check this to see how the HN community responded.

I've cold emailed a lot of well known people before and most of them responded. I guess it was 'positivity' that skewed my thoughts. But, your right, a Lotto chance of Bill Gates coming on here.

malloreon• 12 years ago

These are wonderful trends that are keeping more people alive and for that we should both be grateful and thankful to those who work on keeping them moving in that direction.

What effects do these trends have on poverty and food insecurity?

billpg• 12 years ago

My mind added an exclamation point to that headline.

Good News! You May Have Missed 2014!

Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

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