TODAY or tomorrow, a five-year-old child in a slum in Kenya will die
painfully of dysentery. This is not unusual. A thousand children in the world
die like this every day. And the toll is rising now that three-quarters of
the Shigella bacteria that cause dysentery resist treatment with old
antibiotics like ampicillin.
Yet over in neighbouring Uganda, amid similar poverty, another five-year-old
will get dysentery and survive. The difference: ciprofloxacin, a relatively new
antibiotic that still kills Shigella. In Uganda this lifesaver sells
for just seven cents a tablet. In Kenya, each pill costs $2.42, putting a
course of…
