The end of extreme poverty? Here's a good-news story you don't hear much about: we're making huge strides in defeating the worst of the world's poverty.

• Author: Kristof, Nicholas D.
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Imagine having to pick just one of your children to save, while leaving the others to face death.

In Cambodia, I met a woman whose daughter had just died of malaria and who was left caring for seven children and grandchildren. She showed me her one anti-malaria mosquito net and told me how every evening she agonizes over which children to squeeze under it--and which ones to leave out and expose to malarial mosquitoes.

That's the kind of excruciating question that extreme poverty forces on families.

For thousands of generations, a vast majority of humans have lived brief, illiterate lives marked by disease, disability, and the loss of children. As recently as 1980, just over half the people in the developing world lived in extreme poverty, defined as surviving on less than $1.25 a day in today's money.

Yet in a time of depressing news worldwide, here's one area of amazing progress: According to the World Bank, the share of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty has been reduced from 1 in 2 in 1980 to 1 in 5 today. Now the aim is to reduce that to almost zero by 2030.

There will still be poverty, of course, just as there is far too much poverty lingering in America. But the extreme hanging-by-your-fingernails subsistence with your children uneducated and dying--that will go from typical to essentially nonexistent just in the course of my adult life.

That's because of a huge global investment in vaccines, medicines, schooling, sanitation, and technology. In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5. Now that figure is down to about 6 million. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose foundation is pioneering the vaccines and medicines saving these lives, says that in his lifetime the number will drop below 1 million.

"There's been this change of consciousness and a massive mobilization of resources," says Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center in Washington. "It's had an enormous effect."

Diseases Dying Out

Ancient diseases like polio and measles are on the way out thanks to massive vaccination programs. Guinea worm is a tropical disease in which a worm moves through the body under the skin and causes intense pain and lifelong disabilities. It's on the verge of being eradicated thanks to improved sanitation and effective drug treatments. Malaria has been brought under control in many countries, and a vaccine may reduce its toll even further.

AIDS is also receding. Last year in southern...