Rabies

I had no idea, but apparently rabies remains a serious health problem in parts of the world:

Each year, the disease kills about 55,000 people — that’s 150 a day — almost all of them in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, and more than 7 million people receive post-exposure treatment after being bitten by a rabid animal. Treatment is not just expensive, but time-consuming: a full course of vaccination requires five visits to a hospital or health clinic during one month. Which, if you live in rural Africa, can mean many hours of travel and time not working. Indeed, the global economic cost of rabies is estimated to be more than $583 million. And that doesn’t count the trauma that deaths from rabies inflict on families and communities. For though rabies kills many fewer people than malaria, it causes far, far more fear.

Olivia Judson says the good news is that "Rabies could be eliminated in as little as five years" if we were willing to commit the resources. And, indeed, we should. One unfortunate consequence of the "aid doesn't work" literature is that it's tended to obscure the fact that even if aid doesn't produce economic growth (and I think this claim is overstated), public health aid most certainly does save lives. People used to die of smallpox and now they don't. 150 people die of rabies every day, and if we took action to stop that, that would be "working" in my book.