East Coast Fever

No. I haven't suddenly become an expert in obscure tropical diseases. But the following story from New Scientist today seems appropriate to the times that are a-forming:

A grant of $28 million to combat disease in African farm animals aims to save the livelihoods of some of the world's poorest farmers. Currently, an estimated one-quarter of all livestock in the developing world die from preventable diseases each year.

So why has something not be done about this before? Well, there's a background to this issue:

[...] East Coast fever [...] costs Africa $200 million every year. "African governments used to make a vaccine," says Steve Sloan of GALVmed, but this stopped when many state veterinary services were dismantled during the 1990s debt crisis.

Who's helping out this time round? The very same people who - when wearing their business caps - are quite happy, time and time again, to plunder scarce resources across the globe through exorbitant pricing and underhand business tactics (here an example from 1994, here and here more recent examples).

Kind of makes me want to get rid of Georgia after all.

Not that I will. Not with my editor's cap on.