The UN's Millennium Development Goals | Aspirations and obligations | Economist.com: "The chief appeal of the MDGs is precisely that they convert high rhetoric into hard numbers. But most of the targets are less rigorous than they look. There is, for example, no way of knowing whether several of them are being met or not. In a forthcoming paper in Public Library of Science Medicine, an academic journal, Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa points out that only one African country (Mauritius) registers births and deaths according to UN standards, and that no country regularly measures how many people are newly infected by tuberculosis. In July 2000, he says, a scientist concluded that it was not possible, in general, to measure the number of new cases of malaria. These shortcomings will prove increasingly embarrassing to the UN, Mr Attaran predicts. As 2015 approaches, people will want to know whether the MDGs have been met, and the UN will not be able to tell them."