Vaccination vanquished the onetime global curse of smallpox, a hospital cook in Somalia becoming its final fatality in 1977. Also greatly weakened are diphtheria, leprosy, malaria, polio, and tetanus. Recently the United Nations Children's Fund said the child death rate from preventable diseases, such as dysentery and diarrhea, dropped from 5 million in 1990 to about 2.5 million today. Yet full success against infectious diseases no longer is expected. As old diseases once fading mutate and develop resistance to medicines, they reemerge.
New ailments flare up.
And half a century after the medical breakthrough of penicillin, many microbes are resistant to antibiotics. While medical researchers and drug companies should not become complacent about headline ailments like AIDS and Ebola, their energies are needed more to prevent and treat common killers. Also in the modern global village it behooves rich nations to help poorer ones overcome health problems. Presently 85 percent of the world's available medicines go to about 15 percent of the global population. Little private research is conducted on rapidly spreading tropical diseases because pharmaceutical companies cannot profit from developing drugs for people who cannot afford them.