New Treatments For The World's Poorest

One way to judge the quality of health care in a country is life expectancy. By that measure, tiny Andorra on the border between France and Spain ranks first in the world: 83½ years.

The United States is 45th, with the average lifespan at 78 years.

Sub-Saharan Africa lags far, far behind, with Swaziland ranked last. The average lifespan there is just 32 years. But progress is being made and diseases once considered scourges are now being controlled.

Dr. Peter Hotez is an authority on neglected tropical diseases, which afflict 1 billion people.

"These are the most common infections of the world's poorest people," he told CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook.

Former President Jimmy Carter still remembers the first time he saw a guinea worm in an African woman.

"When I got closer I saw that she was holding her right breast in her arm, and from the nipple of her breast was coming a guinea worm," he said. "I cried, I get emotional thinking about it. A year later we went back to that village, zero guinea worm."

But it doesn't end there.

"They have multiple parasites at the same time," Hotez said. "So we could no longer afford to be just using single approaches to diseases."

A simple but profound idea has emerged. Hotez said it was something of a "Eureka" moment. Instead of treating all the diseases separately, doctors came up with a "rapid impact package," which is just four drugs to treat seven diseases. At 50 cents a year per patient, it's a bargain. Support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped launch the global network program.

"Suddenly the kids are sitting up and learning in school and they're sleeping at night," Hotez said.

Nearly 40 million people have been helped in the program's first year.

"Within three to five years our hope is to target 500 million people," Hotez said.

It's a stunning success for the world's poorest people.