Tragedy of the death of a child in the developed world

For Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, the ideal of valuing all human life equally began to jar against reality some years ago, when he read an article about diseases in the developing world. He came across the statistic that half a million children die every year from rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhea in children. He had never heard of rotavirus.

“How could I never have heard of something that kills half a million children every year?” he asked himself.

He then learned that in developing countries, millions of children die from diseases that have been eliminated, or virtually eliminated, in the United States. That shocked him because he assumed that, if there are vaccines and treatments that could save lives, governments would be doing everything possible to get them to the people who need them.

As Gates told a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva last year, he and his wife, Melinda, "couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that — in our world today — some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not."

Gates’s speech to the World Health Assembly concluded on an optimistic note, looking forward to the next decade when "people will finally accept that the death of a child in the developing world is just as tragic as the death of a child in the developed world."

[Excerpt of an article by Peter Singer, The New York Times]