It seems like the Pope and Bono of U2 fame, along with a host of other individuals are weighing in on the fight against diseases by buying bonds that will fund life saving vaccinations in developing countries. This is one of the efforts to reach the Millennium development goals the U.N. has set in the hopes of eliminating extreme poverty in the world.

While hunger may be a symptom in extremely poor nations, disease is one of the major causes that prevent these countries from breaking the cycle of poverty. Imagine a large part of your population all of a sudden being too sick to get out of bed. Now imagine if that large portion consisted of the majority of your work force. If a family is producing just enough to get by and disease hits it would be very hard for them to make up for lost work. A healthy population at least has a chance of climbing out of the poverty pit.

It is interesting to see an innovative economic initiative being built to address these issues. I chewed a guys ear off talking about how economics doesn’t have to be about the rich getting richer but as a means to bring everyone up. Many people do not want to believe that, but as Jeffrey Sachs says, it is not at all a zero sum game.

Now back to working on the OLPC build.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]