Yes, low tech things like properly washing hands can save lives, but what's even more important is public awareness and public disclosure: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/public_di...

"Rates of mortality from coronary artery bypass surgery varied widely among hospitals before the state began requiring public reporting of death rates from the procedure. Four years into mandatory reporting requirements, average hospital death rates from the operation fell by 41 percent."

Water treatment actual was high tech at some point. This says more about how far some of the world still must come than it does about research.

People want so much to comment on anything relevant to tech, it gets tiresome.

This means that the Guinea Worm is now a very endangered species. Won't someone think of the worms?

Probably this is a not-very-empathizable example (thus the downvotes), but the principle is sound. Humans re-engineer the Earth to obey human morality. We think the wolf killing the sheep is wrong, so we put a fence between the wolf and the sheep. Now the wolves start starving to death, so we toss sheep steaks over the fence. It's a weird equilibrium. (Though possibly solved one day, for the most part, if we get vat-grown meat right.)

I think probably that if we do vat-grown meat, the sheep all die without offspring, since we'd have no reason to breed them and they're not very good at surviving on their own.

Well, if you wish to offer some habitat.