The gift of life

Of all the cities in the world, Las Vegas - which hosted the Informex exhibition last month - must be among the most bizarre. To walk around the Piazza San Marco in Venice or sit on a cafe terrace and watch the gondolas - complete with operatic gondoliers - float by, all without stepping outside the hotel, is without doubt a surreal experience.

Wherever you go your hearing is assaulted by a cacophony of slot machines ringing, whirring, buzzing and clanking as they swallow up literally millions of dollars every day. It is estimated that players lose $6bn a year at Las Vegas casinos alone.

It is hard to imagine a starker contrast than that between the conspicuous wealth of a nation whose economy is supposed to be struggling and the poverty and disease of the developing world. So Bill Gates's pledge to donate $750m to the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation (Gavi) over the next 10 years has struck a particular chord with one still recovering from the tawdry excess of the US's fastest growing city.

According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, current vaccination efforts are failing to reach an estimated 27 million children in developing countries every year. Gavi was set up in 2000 to co-ordinate worldwide vaccination programmes, and has already immunised 54 million children against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B, influenza type B and yellow fever.

All right, the man's personal fortune may amount to the same as the GDP of a number of the world's poorest countries, and this donation will hardly leave him on the breadline.

But there is no denying the fact that he has chosen to invest his wealth not in works of art, however beautiful, nor in architectural monuments, nor in expanding his massive business empire, but in the lives of millions of children who otherwise might have no future at all.

And this is not his first such gesture: over the last decade the Gates Foundation has pledged $7bn to good causes, including $83m to help fight tuberculosis, $168m to fund research into malaria and $60m to seek ways of reducing the risk of HIV infection among women in developing countries.

So here's to you, Mr Gates, for doing as an individual what governments the world over have failed to do. Let's hope your pledge shames them into some much-needed action.

But sadly, I rather doubt that it will.