It is irrelevant whether the countries currently have a GDP to sustain these plans. These countries have insufficient health care, and the donor countries are going to provide valuable drugs and assistance. In fact, as the investment is to be spent over 20 years it is clear that the donor countries will provide a long term helping hand in the areas of child health and immunisation.

As far as helping a country’s economy goes, I don’t think you can do anything more helpful than lowering its child mortality rate, or its rate of premature deaths from preventable disease.

There are lots of reasons to criticise this plan, though. For example, it is propping up the Western drug companies unfair and uncompetitive patents. Shouldn’t we really be working to break the stranglehold they have on prices and availability of essential drugs? If the drugs cost a more reasonable amount the West could help a lot more, and the developing countries could help themselves too.

The most cynical way to see this is as basically a way of ploughing $1bn into the UK/Scandinavian pharmaceutical industry. It is companies like GSK that will be banking this money.

To answer you initial question, “what happens when you stop feeding the money?” – well, you have a healthier population of working age, living longer, which is a better base for building an economy.

Does this mean there’re automated bots to check whois db so that they can target users (say advertisements) based on their geographical location rather than depending on the IP range databases that’s assigned to specific regions/countries?