Humanity's greatest accomplishment of the past five decades, declared Bill Gates this week, is the reduction in the number of deaths among young children by half, to 10m a year in 2007. The world's most successful capitalist heaped praise on the World Health Organisation (who), while unveiling an ambitious new global scheme to eradicate polio within a few years. For his part, the agency's top polio man, Bruce Ayl-ward, described the fight against the disease in the language of markets: "Eradication is the venture capital of public health: the risks are huge but so too are the rewards."
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