What Money Can Buy: Bill Gates and Africa:

[andyfox]

A long article in the October 24th edition of the New Yorker is about health problems, especially malaria, in Africa (and elsewhere) and what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to do about it.

The morality rate for infants in the developing world is sixteen times greater than it is for infants in the West. At least one woman dies every minute from avoidable complications of pregnancy. Half of these deaths occur in Africa, where hundreds of millions of children, and almost as many adults, suffer needlessly from illnesses that most people in the West have never heard of.

Malaria, the world's most prevalent parasitic disease, kills as many as three million people every year--almost all of whom are under five, desperately poor, and African. In most years, more than 500,000 case of illness can be attributed to the disease, although exact numbers are difficult to assess because many people don’t (or can't) seek care. It is not unusual for a family earning less than two hundred dollars a year to spend a quarter of its income on malaria treatment, and what they often get no longer works.

The Gates Foundation has an endowment of $29,000,000,000. This is more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Its goal is simple: to rid the world of disease, particularly the many illnesses that are essentially ignored because they affect the world's poorest people.

In January, the foundation contributed $750,000,000 to the U.N. Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization, to fight easily preventable diseases, like diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles. Gates also provided funds to vaccinate 42,000,000 children against hepatitis B.

The annual budget of the World Health Organization is $1.65 billion. Since 2000, the Gates foundation has spent $6 billion to address health issues in the Third World--more than nearly every contributing nation to the W.H.O., and far more than any other charity. In May, Gates gave $250,000,000 to help pay for the Grand Challenges, a series of fourteen fundamental obstacles to scientific progress which, if solved, would lead to dramatic improvements in the health of the world. The challenges, which include goals like developing vaccines that require no needles or refrigeration, were first issued in 2003 (along with a $200,000,000 grant) and a thousand scientists from 75 countries responded with proposals.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that the Gates foundation has had: the research programs of entire countries have been restored, and fields that have languished for years have once against burst to life.

"It just blows my mind how little money has been spent on malaria research," Gates said. "What has prevented the rich world from attempting this? I just keep asking myself, Do we really not care because it doesn't affect us? Is that what it is?

"Human suffering as a result of malaria is incomparable. I refuse to accept it. I refuse to sit there and say, OK, next problem, this one doesn't bother me. It does bother me. Very much. And the only way for that to change is to stop malaria. So that is what we are going to have to do."