As someone who is a medical provider, and has spent half his medical career so far in Emergency Medicine or Urgent Medicine, I take issue with the premise that a healthy one year old child must be kept near a medical facility at all times because a life threatening illness may develop at any time.
Now if you're in your 7th or 8th decade of life and have already had 2 heart attacks, then yes, by all means, do the tax payer a favor and live across the street from Mass General. Regular, healthy, immunized one year olds? They're not all dropping like flies and being saved by the ambulances (I used to run one of those too) all the time.
Yes, kids go from well to sick quicker than adults, but usually they go right back to well faster than grown ups. My 2 year old had a fever of 103.5 a couple weeks ago and very quickly looked really bad. An hour later, he looked great. A LOT of what we do in urgent care is pat worried parents on the head, observe the kid for an hour or to, and let them go home having done pretty much nothing at all. Croup, for example, can be REALLY scary to watch, but usually the kids get through it without aggressive intervention.
It appears this poor 1 year old tyke got salmonella. That's perhaps more of a hazard out at sea, but it's a hazard that potentially exists in every kitchen and McDonald's as well. From what the news is saying, the kid was "in stable condition" as soon as the frogs got there. It's entirely plausible that the kid maybe would have been fine without medical care. We may never know. Even if the kid was saved by the medical team, it's lightning strike odds that it happened when they were as far as they could possibly be from help. Wouldn't have made news at all if they were in Cabo and wandered down to the local doctor's office and got some Cipro. In fact, the kid was probably only going to be away from potential medical help for a few weeks total during an entire circumnavigation.
Healthy kids just don't need to be kept near a hospital at all times unless there is a known underlying illness.
MedSailor