A Healthy Balance

Despite Her Majesty's Government's filleting of the international aid budget, which is intended to incentivise the world's more idle nations with the benign goad of treatable yet untreated illness, Togo has been stamping out neglected tropical diseases for more than a decade. As might be expected from a former colony of the beastly French, the west African country has been so disobliging as to try and usurp Britain's world-beating status as a hardy hotspot hub of thrusting scientific pluck, and has even received an award from the sovereignty-sapping bureaucrats at the World Health Organisation for eliminating four out of a set of twenty preventable conditions which tend to be neglected in health budgets. It's all the more fortunate, therefore, that the master race is on hand to compensate for the Togolese expulsion of trachoma, Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis and sleeping sickness with some old-fashioned British hospitality towards polio, rickets and cholera.