Rolling Out the Red Carpet

Oct 16th, 2007 6:27 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

Seattle is welcoming malaria notables with fanfare usually reserved for movie stars. In fact, they’re hardly distinguishing between the two.

A cover article in today’s Seattle Times calls the Gates Malaria Forum malaria’s “Oscars,” its “Woodstock.” “This is probably as competitive a ticket as the Bruce Springsteen concert,” one fortunate attendee is quoted as saying. (Read the full text here.)

Here come some of the malaria A-listers now. As the conference gets underway, it’s worth knowing who they (and the institutions they represent) are…

• Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer is the head of the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), a $1.2 billion five-year initiative to control malaria. Looking dashing in work boots still caked with red dirt, he is just back from one of the 15 African countries where PMI is working to cut malaria deaths by half. By the end of 2007, the program expects to reach 30 million people with lifesaving malaria prevention and treatment.
• Chairman of the Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, Rajat Gupta, comes from the private sector as a senior partner worldwide of McKinsey & Company. The Global Fund was created by the world’s wealthiest countries in 2002 and currently provides 2/3rds of all funding for malaria prevention and treatment programs worldwide — almost $3 billion since 2002.
• And the click of cameras can only mean, yes, it’s Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Minister of Health from Ethiopia. Minister Tedros is a rising star in malaria circles thanks to his country’s aggressive distribution of nearly 20 million bed nets over the past two years. As recently as 2003, Ethiopia trailed its neighbors with only five percent of households owning a single bed net. Today, it is fast-approaching an unprecedented goal: providing two long-lasting insecticide-treated nets for all households in malaria-endemic areas.

And with that, the orchestra is warming up and the conference is getting underway. Let us send you inside…

-Martin Edlund, Malaria No More

Malaria No More’s mission is simple: no more deaths from malaria. Learn more and help prevent a million child deaths this year by donating a $10 bed net at www.MalariaNoMore.org.

TAGS: Gates Crashing Live Blog, Malaria, Malaria No More