In this guest post, Bill Gates discusses the themes of his annual letter, which looks back on progress made and lessons learned in the fight against extreme poverty. Originally published on Impatient Optimists, blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
My job is to learn about global health and development — and to travel to poor countries to meet farmers who can’t grow enough food, mothers who can’t keep children healthy, and heroes in the field who are doing something about those emergencies. Very few people can devote the time to really understand these complex problems. Even fewer can actually meet the people who are struggling to overcome them. That is why I write an annual letter every year.
I want people to know about the amazing progress we’ve made. I also want them to see how much more progress it will take before we live in a truly equitable world.
World Polio Day is simultaneously a celebration and a call to action.
It’s a celebration because in the past 20 years, polio cases are down 99 percent, thanks to one of the most ambitious global health campaigns in history. Through a vast partnership, we’ve delivered polio drops to children in impossible circumstances—in active war zones, in remote mountainous regions that are unreachable for months at a time. It’s a great achievement.
This post was adapted from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s blog, Foundation Notes.
My third annual letter came out recently. One of the major themes of the letter is the miracle of vaccines. Last year, Melinda and I announced that we were working together with partners to make this the Decade of Vaccines, and I wanted to use this year’s letter to explain why.
In particular, my letter focuses on the vaccine for polio, since it’s helped the world get to the threshold of something amazing: eradicating the disease altogether. We’re incredibly close and we need to finish the job.
We put together a video, called “Vaccines Save Lives,” to try to describe why vaccines are a miracle in a vivid way. I hope you enjoy it—and share it with your friends.
Melinda and I are heading to London in a couple of days to thank the UK for its history of generosity and remarkable commitment to foreign aid. We want to share the proof that investments in global health and development are saving lives, improving livelihoods, and building prosperous societies.
In the last 50 years, child deaths in the developing world have been cut by more than 50 percent; polio cases have been reduced by 99 percent; measles deaths in Africa dropped by 92 percent between 2000 and 2008; and malaria cases have been reduced by 50 percent in 38 countries between 2000 and 2008. Through our work, especially our visits to the field, Melinda and I have been deeply touched by personal stories of lives changed for the better. We have seen clear evidence that targeted foreign investments are saving lives, preventing and curing disease, and helping people to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty.
Earlier this year, we transferred the Living Proof campaign to the ONE Campaign. Living Proof highlights the positive impact foreign aid is making. It aims to challenge stereotypes and misconceptions about development assistance, using a series of success stories that will galvanize support, energize activists and ultimately inspire action. With the message that effective aid in global health and development is working, the campaign will share the proof that smart aid is having a lasting impact on people’s lives and livelihoods and advancing real progress in developing countries.
ONE is expanding Living Proof to reach new audiences in more countries and to highlight the lasting impact of European investments. On October 18, the ONE Campaign is launching Living Proof in London. Both Melinda and I will be there to share stories about real lives and real progress being made around the world.
For us, these success stories have a profound impact on the way we look at our investments, and we believe that telling these stories to as many people as possible can help change the way they look at what we can achieve in the future. Together with ONE and our partners, we want to get these stories and facts out and inform the conversation around the opportunities in global health and development.
We are confident that spreading the word about what’s working is one of the most important things we can do to motivate governments and others to invest in effective development aid.
I’m honored to speak at the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna today. This conference marks an important turning point in the fight against AIDS.
There are good reasons to be hopeful – we have seen amazing progress. The number of people getting treatment for AIDS has increased twelve-fold since 2003. The people at this conference and major partners such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and PEPFAR have helped make this possible.
At the same time, we have to recognize that these are tough times for those of us who are passionate about fighting HIV. Economic turbulence has driven up government deficits, and some countries have responded by reducing their investments in global health. These are the challenges we all face, but they don’t have to define our time.
And that is why, even as we are hopeful, we have to be honest with ourselves: We don’t have the money to treat our way out of this epidemic. Even as we continue to advocate for more funding, we need to make sure we’re getting the most benefit from each dollar of funding and every ounce of effort.
If we push for a new focus on efficiency, especially in prevention, we can, over the next two decades, drive down the number of new infections dramatically.
Here’s how we can do that:
We need to scale up existing tools – like male circumcision and preventing mother-to-child transmission.
We need to focus prevention efforts on the communities where transmission is the highest – such as men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers.
We also need innovations in basic science, diagnostics, computer modeling, and our understanding of the virus itself. This would make it possible to create new weapons for our fight against AIDS, prevent even more infections, and save even more lives. Vaccines, new diagnostics, and antiretroviral-based prevention (pills, injections and gels) are some of the new tools I’m really excited about.
If we scale up existing interventions and add new tools in the hardest-hit countries, it would change the face of AIDS. New cases would plunge. Millions more could be treated. The control of HIV would stand alongside the eradication of smallpox as one of the great public health victories in history.
This is the opportunity we have. We can keep doing things the old way, and keep getting the same result. Or we can push ourselves to make the most of every dollar of funding and every ounce of effort: to identify the most effective ways to save lives, and to share what we learn as widely as possible.
If we do that, we will have matched our compassion with the growing capacities of science, and we will start to write the story of the end of AIDS.
You can watch webcasts from the conference at www.kff.org/AIDS2010. Check the foundation’s HIV webpage for updates from Vienna throughout the week.
This week in Seattle, an extraordinary group of people – scientists, policymakers, and advocates – came together for three days to discuss what can be done to stop malaria. Melinda and I issued a challenge to those attending the meeting. We asked them to begin charting a course to eradicate malaria – not just to control or reduce it, but to work toward a time when no one on earth is infected with malaria, and no mosquitoes carry the disease.
Today, malaria kills more than one million people every year, most of them children in Africa. That’s the equivalent of losing every student in the New York City public school system in one year.
We know that eradicating malaria is an audacious goal. But advances in science and medicine, new political commitments, and the dedication of people like you have given the world an historic opportunity to conquer malaria. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly, but I’m optimistic that we can make this disease history.
At the forum in Seattle, Melinda and I called on the U.S. presidential candidates to commit to expand the President’s Malaria Initiative, a great program started by President Bush. I hope you will join us in asking all of the candidates to make this pledge and keep the fight against malaria on the national agenda.
I am confident that together, we can produce the energy, compassion, and commitment needed to win the fight against malaria.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
