The Miracle Mineral

For their part, government officials say Mali's chronic shortage of skills severely hampers efforts to launch new programs. "Mali is vast, and the level of knowledge is basic," says Adama Diawara, a ranking official at the Ministry of Health, adding that before approving zinc, "we needed evidence that it worked."

He doesn't have to go far to find that. In Morola, a village of some 500 people nestled among mango trees near the Guinea border, locals say diarrhea deaths have fallen sharply since zinc tablets were distributed last year. When I visited in May, the village chief gathered five women to talk about their lives. The group had lost seven children among them, four to diarrhea. Kinza Diallo, 29, said that when her 1-year-old daughter contracted diarrhea in 2004, she clutched her on the back of a motorbike for the hour's ride to the nearest hospital, where she was given pills and sent away. The girl died two days later. "Diarrhea has killed three of my children," she said. "I have been very unlucky." Now, she said, when one of her children gets sick, she heads straight to the village pharmacy and buys a course of zinc tablets. Though several of the five women's children have been sick in the past year, none has died.

It's the same story in Sogola. Suleiman Djarra was, in fact, one of the village's last diarrhea victims. Aiseta Traoré watched in horror last February when another of her sons, Ablaye, developed symptoms similar to Suleiman's. "I was terrified," she says. But once she started administering the tablets to her 2-year-old, he "came back to life," Traoré says. Some 3 million children have died of diarrhea since Suleiman did. Now donors and governments have a chance to end this global tragedy. Let's hope they do.