Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Guinea worm disease hit 3.5M people in 1986. Here's how that goes: you drink contaminated water. Larvae eat through your intestine. Mature worms eat through your skin; you reintroduce them to water to cool the searing pain. CDC & Gates collaborated. 51 cases worldwide in 2019.

Maybe not "saving the world," but I think it's pretty cool that we've nearly fully eradicated a worm that literally eats its way through living human beings with the massive support of a billionaire — for whom this was just one of many, many ongoing public health projects

I'm very happy that Bill Gates is putting his money to good use. I'm also not entirely sure what the point of the original article was. At the same time, how many billionaires have had Gates-level impacts? Depending on philanthropy does not seem to be a good systemic solution.

Yeah, so let's... tell the few that *do* try to do that to stop trying to be Batman? Or something? Fucking yikes.

To be clear, I'm fully aware of how unlikely it is that either you or this author were even aware that guinea worm disease existed. You'd never have gotten it whether or not it had been nearly eliminated. Them's the breaks.

I grew up in India and I'm well aware of the Gates Foundation's work to help eradicate polio and malaria and am grateful for it. If billionaires do genuinely help, I'm happy to give them the credit they deserve.

But he's also *not* Batman in that he's pretty quietly doing not-very-glamorous work that's having an impact. If that were the norm for billionaires that would be fine, but is it?