99 good news stories you may have missed

Future Crunch has 99 good news stories from 2019, you have probably never seen. Here’s a few:

• New surveys revealed that the population of humpback whales in the South Atlantic region now number 24,900 — almost 93% of their population size before they were hunted to the brink of extinction
• In Kenya, poaching rates have dropped by 85% for rhinos and 78% for elephants in the last five years
• Algeria and Argentina officially eliminated malaria this year
• The Global Burden of Disease Report said that between 1990 and 2017, the number of kids and teenagers dying around the world decreased by more than half, from 13.77 million to 6.64 million
• Remember bird flu, the disease that was going to be the next global pandemic? There hasn’t been a single H5N1 human infection since February 2017
• In the biggest breakthrough for cystic fibrosis in decades, a new drug that targets the genetic roots of the disease was approved by the FDA.
• Malawi eliminated the world’s most common infectious eye disease, trachoma, the second African country to do so after Ghana. In 2014 more than eight million people were at risk. Today, that number is zero.
• A new Ebola vaccine was cleared for distribution in 2019, and is working miracles, reducing mortality rates from 70% to as low as 6%.
• New research showed that the proportion of people in extreme poverty around the world fell from 36% in 1990 to 8.6% in 2018.
• The biggest global story you didn’t hear about this year was the successful conclusion of India’s extraordinary sanitation drive. In the last five years, 90 million toilets have been built, 93% of households now have access, and 500 million people have stopped defecating in the open.
• China now has equal numbers of girls and boys in primary and high school, and more than half of university students are women, up from less than a quarter in 1978