Once upon a time...like yesterday, today and tomorrow...kids died of a variety of childhood diseases before age 5. Here in the "developed" world (no comment on intellectual development implied) anyone with at least one functional neuron left in their cerebral cortex gets their kids vaccinated, thus eliminating such worries. Measles? What's that? Deadly? What?

In the not-so-much-developed world, measles regularly kills kids. In 2007, 197,000 people died from measles. On the off chance that that's not an easily graspable number, try this - that's 22 deaths per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Picture a couple of jumbo jets a day crashing. Every day.

Impressed? You oughta be, but that ain't nothin'. Try rotavirus. Half a million kids a year?!? The good news is that there's now an effective vaccine. It's just that it's a tad tough to get in places where the per capita annual income is somewhere around nothing.

Sooooo, on the off-chance that you've got a spare buck or two, maybe you could give it to these folks. Heck, I did.