KEY POINTS:
I work in the bad news business. As an aid worker if I'm not busy with natural disasters, it's civil war, if it's not civil war it's a terrible epidemic. But I want to write about something you don't see often - good news, even rarer in that
it comes from poor countries.
This week new data will show a huge reduction in measles deaths worldwide - saving millions of children's lives.
The breakthrough has been announced by the Measles Initiative, a partnership of the United Nations Children's Fund, the World Health Organisation and the American Red Cross. In the past five years their work has resulted in measles deaths plummeting by 60 per cent - saving about 7.5 million lives.
Measles is the most contagious disease known to humanity and for children in poor countries it's one of the most deadly. It is also preventable by vaccination, and a cheap and safe inoculation has been available since the 1960s.
Dennis McKinlay, Unicef New Zealand's executive director, says: "Just two doses of an inexpensive, safe, and available measles vaccine can prevent most, if not all, measles deaths."
Each year measles kills 1 million children, most of them under 5. Survivors are often left with lifelong disabilities including blindness and brain damage.
These figures are even more shocking because effective immunisation, which includes vaccine and safe injection equipment, costs just $1 and has been available for more than 30 years.
Measles is a viral disease spread by infected droplets during sneezing and coughing, and by touching contaminated objects. It causes fever and a rash, and can lead to convulsions, pneumonia, bronchitis and, for many poor children, death.
In cramped, insanitary places like refugee camps, measles can kill a child in less than five hours. During the Pakistan earthquake, my Unicef colleagues and I were literally running from camp to camp with vaccines trying to move faster than the virus.
In industrialised countries the disease is seldom fatal because infected children eat well and have proper medical care, are fully vaccinated and live in sanitary conditions.
However, this is often not the case in many parts of Africa and Asia which lack good healthcare infrastructure. The WHO and Unicef say poor immunisation systems in developing countries are the main reason for high numbers of deaths from measles.
A baby girl born in sub-Saharan Africa faces a 22 per cent risk of death before she turns 15. In China the risk is less than 5 per cent and in industrialised countries just 1.1 per cent.
The main reason for the success of the Measles Initiative is the strong commitment of individual governments, a large allocation of funds and an army of trained volunteers to carry out vaccination campaigns.
Last year Unicef and the WHO performed one of their largest free vaccination campaigns in Bangladesh. About 1.3 million children were immunised with the help of 15,000 volunteers.
Normally parents are charged about 50c to get their children vaccinated. However, in the teeming, fetid slums of Dhaka, even this nominal amount is too much for some families.
Last year Fatema Khatun's youngest son, Hossain, died in her arms. The 5-year-old was one of the 23 per cent of children who have not been immunised against measles. He became one of the nearly 20,000 Bangladeshi children who die every year from the disease.
His mother wanted to get Hossain immunised but says, "I couldn't because they asked for 20 taka [less than 50c]." It might seem a small amount, but for her it was a choice between spending a day's wages on food for her family, or on an injection.
Ms Khatun says Hossain had been out playing as usual when he first got sick. "Then he had a fever for three days."
She took him to a doctor when the fever started, and he prescribed paracetamol and rest. The measles rash came after three days of fever, but neighbours said there was no need to go to the doctor twice.
"Then he got a bit better, and the rash went down for three days. For those three days he was playing with the other children. On the day he died he was playing with other children, he was walking along the road like usual, and for the first time since he'd got sick, he had drunk some sugarcane juice."
Ms Khatun had left for work early that morning and when she arrived home she found Hossain lying in a ball in their small hut.
"I came back and held him in my lap to give him a little bit of water. He drank one sip and died. I was holding him when he died."
She pointed out a small mound of earth by the riverbank where she had buried him with his plastic cricket bat.
The tragedy is his death never should have happened. However, thanks to the Measles Initiative and the free inoculations, her other four children will be spared the same fate.
The slashing of the measles mortality rate shows what can be achieved with a concerted effort by donor countries, Governments, aid agencies and volunteers.
However, the eradication of diseases is so complex that it has only ever been achieved once - with smallpox.
And measles is just one of the diseases which are still blighting the lives of thousands of children.
In the past 50 years vast gains have been made in polio, Guinea worm, neonatal tetanus and leprosy. However the challenge of getting rid of them altogether is immense.
Aid agencies around the world committed themselves to eliminating polio from the planet by the year 2000. But seven years past the deadline, even optimists say total eradication is a long way off.
The drive against polio threatens to become a costly display of all that can conspire against even the most ambitious efforts to eliminate a disease - cultural suspicions, logistical nightmares, competition for resources from many other diseases, and simple exhaustion. As the polio campaign has shown, even the miracle of discovering a vaccine is not enough.
Unicef immunisation expert Gareth Jones says: "The irony of many of these killer diseases is that they are not waiting on new vaccines, new drugs or new technology. A little money and the political will would go a long way.
"The primary challenge today is to transfer what we already know into action. Building up health infrastructures - clinics, better nurse's wages and basic drugs - is what would make the biggest improvement to the lives of the poorest children"
Better use of existing, available and affordable interventions like providing insecticide-treated bed nets, ensuring clean drinking water and mothers breastfeeding exclusively for longer would produce immediate results. The trouble is that these down-to-earth approaches lack the glamour of discovering new cures.
* Georgina Newman is communications manager for Unicef NZ
