18 in this minute disturbs me. Of those 18, 16 did not need to happen. The 16 could do nothing about it. The 16 have no power, no choice. What disturbs me is that the 18 in this minute = 10 million in a year; of the 10, 8 million shouldn’t have happened.

What is keeping me  restless and awake at night is wondering why 17.5 million cannot prevent 8 million bad and unnecessary things from happening. It seems pretty straight forward to me: We’re each responsible for less than 1/2 of a bad thing per year. So, we don’t have to do it alone; someone else gets 1/2. We don’t have to figure-it-out on our own; we have a team. We don’t even need to incur the expense on our own. We can take turns and take vacations from the bad things. We can have sick days to curl-up in bed with a warm blankie, eat soda crackers and chicken noodle soup, and not think about our 1/2 of the bad thing. We don’t need to think about the bad things all the time even when we are on bad-thing-duty. I don’t know how much of our day we need to be on bad-thing-duty, but I bet it is only for a few minutes each day – maybe with weekends off.

The 17.5 million aren’t the only ones who can, have been, and want to be on bad-thing-duty; all sorts of people from all sorts of places, from all sorts of walks of life have been working to keep these bad things from happening. But the bad things are still happening – in some places more than others – but where the bad things happen doesn’t change the fact that they are very bad and 8 out of 10 shouldn’t be happening at all. If the 17.5 million were better at bad-thing-duty, there would be far fewer than the 16 in this minute. If everyone who wants to work on bad-thing-duty worked together, there could be many more millions to share in the work of preventing the bad things; bad-thing-duty may take less time than it takes for a Caribbean cruise!

The 17.5 million are the largest healthcare workforce in the world: Nurses. The 16 in this minute are the children that are now dead – from 100% preventable causes- in this minute that you and I are not on bad-thing-duty.

http://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html