Gabrielle Fitzgerald of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is on the ground in Tanzania with Dr. Margaret Chan, Mr. Ray Chambers, and Dr. Tachi Yamada. She reports back on their first day:

Our first site visit this trip is to the Amana District Hospital, which provides care to the one million residents of the Ilala municipality. The hospital complex was large and well-maintained, and was filled with orderly rows of mothers and their children waiting to be seen.

Amana sees approximately 1400 people a day, and delivers 100 babies. New mothers are given a bed in the maternity ward for six hours to recover from the delivery of their baby, before being discharged to go back home.

But what has traditionally driven the high volume of patients at the hospital has changed in recent years. In 2006, malaria was the leading cause of admissions for both adults and children. Since then, Amana’s malaria cases have dropped by more than 50%.

The drop in malaria cases is due to increased use of insecticide-treated nets, new anti-malarial medicines and better diagnostic tests.

Tanzanian health officials credit support from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative for this progress, and are confident that these numbers will continue to decrease as malaria programs reach a greater number of the Tanzanian population.

You can learn more about malaria, what it is, and how it’s prevented and treated, here.

You can learn more about bed nets and how they are distributed, here.

-Gabrielle Fitzgerald, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Starting today, we will get on the ground reports from malaria sites in Tanzania and Uganda, as Gabrielle Fitzgerald of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation blogs for us. She will be traveling with Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, Mr. Ray Chambers, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria, and Dr. Tachi Yamada, President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as they visit programs that are making a difference in the fight against malaria. Join us!

Here’s some background and bios on the 3 travelers:

Special Envoy for Malaria Mr. Chambers is a philanthropist and humanitarian, and since February, 2008, has been serving as the United Nations Secretary-General’s first Special Envoy for Malaria. In this capacity, he is committed to achieving the Secretary-General’s goal of ensuring universal access to malaria prevention tools in all endemic countries by the end of 2010, with the ultimate goal of achieving near zero preventable malaria deaths by 2015.

Most of his other efforts have been directed towards children. He is the Founding Chairman of the Points of Light Foundation and co-founded, with Colin Powell, America’s Promise Alliance. Mr. Chambers is Co-Founder of the National Mentoring Partnership, and Founding Chairman of both The Millennium Promise Alliance and Malaria No More.

Mr. Chambers is also the Founding Chairman of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and is a member of the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation He is the former Chairman of Wesray Capital Corporation, which he co-founded with William E. Simon.

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Dr. Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada, president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, leads the foundation’s efforts to help develop and deliver low-cost, life-saving health tools for the developing world. He oversees Global Health’s grantmaking, which focuses on four major activities: discovery, development, delivery, and advocacy.

Before joining the foundation, Yamada served as chairman of research and development and was a member of the board of directors at GlaxoSmithKline. Prior to that, he was chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and physician-in-chief at the University of Michigan Medical Center. Yamada is a past president of the American Gastroenterological Association and the Association of American Physicians, a master of the American College of Physicians, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Academy of Medical Sciences in the United Kingdom.

…..

Dr. Margaret Chan is the Director-General of WHO, appointed by the World Health Assembly on 9 November 2006.

Before being appointed Director-General, Dr. Chan was WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases as well as Representative of the Director-General for Pandemic Influenza.

Prior to joining WHO, she was Director of Health in Hong Kong. During her nine-year tenure as director, Dr. Chan confronted the first human outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza in 1997. She successfully defeated the spate of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong in 2003. She also launched new services to prevent disease and promote better health.

Today in Lecce, Italy, several donors fulfilled their promise to commit $1.5 billion to fight pneumococcal disease, which includes pneumonia, and is one of the biggest killers of children in developing countries around the world. In 2007, Finance Ministers from Canada, Italy, Norway, Russia, and the UK, gathered in Rome with the GAVI Alliance, the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and WHO and pledged to adopt an innovative mechanism to finance vaccines for pneumococcal disease called Advance Market Commitments. Today that pledge became reality.

Every year, pneumococcal disease kills 1.6 million people, more than a million of whom are under five years of age. Pneumonia, the most common form of pneumococcal disease kills one in four children in developing countries, making it the primary cause of death among young children. A vaccine for these diseases could save millions of lives over the coming years.

A vaccine for pneumococcal disease has existed since 2000, and is already part of routine vaccinations for children in developed countries. However, there is not an affordable vaccine for developing countries. The AMC frontloads financing for the vaccine so that once it is available, it will cost developing countries $3.50 per dose instead of the $70 per dose it costs in developed countries. Over the past two years, the donors involved in the AMC have been working to finalize the legal, financial, and regulatory components of the project. Today, the AMC became fully operational.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and panel member at the launch of ONE’s DATA Report yesterday, said “This innovative new model will mean faster access to vaccines for millions of children in poor countries. It’s a great example of how innovation and technology together can produce life-saving advances and make them available to people who need them around the world”.
For more information, read the press release from GAVI Alliance.

-Lisa Fleisher

Thanks to the handy work of our Weldon and Kimberly, we now have videos from this morning’s launch of the ONE DATA Report 2009 in London.

Here’s a 6 minute highlight reel of all of the speakers.

[Panelists: Bill Gates, co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bob Geldof anti-poverty activist and ONE adviser, Dr. Francoise Ndayishimiye, Senior Gender Adviser, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, Arunma Oteh, Vice President for Corporate Services, African Development Bank, Archbishop Desmund Tutu, ONE's International Patron and Jamie Drummond, ONE's Executive Director]

And below, a video of the whole event.

The World Health Organization’s expert advisory panel on immunizations announced today that all children should receive a vaccine that can prevent a severe type of diarrhea and vomiting caused by the rotavirus.

Every year, 600,000 children die from severe diarrhea caused by rotavirus around the world.  Although most of these deaths occur in developing countries, rotavirus also afflicts children in the developed world.  In the United States, 55,000 children are hospitalized because of rotavirus infections every year. 

Research to determine whether the rotavirus vaccine is safe and effective in countries with high child mortality has proven successful: cases of severe diarrhea were reduced after administration of the vaccine.  Funded by the GAVI Alliance, and conducted by PATH, WHO, and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as many research institutions in South Africa and Malawi, this research “clears the way for vaccines that will protect children in the developing world from one of the most deadly diseases they face,” said Dr. Tachi Yamada, President of the Global Health Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As one of the diseases that causes the greatest number of deaths and illness in the developing world but receives little attention and resources, the prevention and treatment of diarrheal diseases is a priority area for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Their work involves funding research to determine the causes of diarrheal disease in developing countries, supporting the development of a vaccine, including the rotavirus vaccine, and efforts to develop medicines and other treatments for diarrheal disease.

Delivering the rotavirus vaccine with a package of other essential interventions including improving water and sanitation to children in need in Africa and Asia will be critical for reducing child mortality.

<em>-Lisa Fleisher</em>

I just got off a conference call hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for bloggers interested in the fight against malaria. Specifically, the call focused on the Grand Challenges Explorations, a grant program that aims to foster innovation in global health research. The Foundation commits $100 million to “expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.”

As World Malaria Day fast approaches, this call focuses particularly on 3 grant recipients who have made some pretty great achievements in fighting malaria through innovation and hard work. Dr. Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University is an astrophysicist, which was fairly compelling to me as that’s not a field I would generally associate with fighting malaria. But his really innovative idea to use optical ways—essentially a flashlight– to disrupt mosquitoes’ sensory networks, thereby limiting their ability to locate human prey, made a lot of sense to me.

Brian Foy of Colorado State University is seeking to end malaria deaths through other ways by developing and strategically employing drugs that would be administered to humans and then kill mosquitoes upon contact with the blood. Pradipsinh Rathod of the University of Washington seeks to confront the problem of mutating strains of malaria by searching for small molecules that could inhibit some of these mutations and give traditional drugs a fighting chance to make an impact.

It was fantastic to hear about this great program and the excellent work being done all around the world to come up with innovative and creative ways to end malaria deaths. You can learn more about Grand Challenge Explorations here.

-Chris Scott

Bill Gates just circulated his first annual letter about his work at the Gates Foundation. It provides some great insight into the Foundation’s past work and their plans for the future.

Bill Gates shakes hands during an AIDS prevention discussion with male sex workers. The meeting was sponsored by a collaboration between AVAHAN and ARM (Assoc. for Rural Mass India), Indian Community Welfare Assoc., TAI hotel, India, December, 2005. credit: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/ Prashant Panjiar.

Excerpts below, full letter here

Bill Gates:

This past July, I went from being full-time at Microsoft to being full-time at the foundation. I took a few weeks off for some family time, including a trip to Beijing for the Olympics, but I was anxious to keep myself mentally challenged and so the pause between jobs was brief.

Many of my friends were concerned that I wouldn’t find the foundation work as engaging or rewarding as my work at Microsoft. I loved my work at Microsoft and it had been my primary focus for over 30 years. I too would have worried if I had paused and thought about it enough. My job at Microsoft had three magical things. First there was an opportunity for big breakthroughs—including changing computers from being expensive and only for big companies to being inexpensive and empowering to individuals with a wide range of great software for almost any task. I wanted a personal computer with great software for myself and everyone else. Second, I thought my skills would let me help create a special company that would be part of a whole new industry. I felt I belonged in the software business, having thought about the engineering and the business possibilities maniacally from age 13. Finally, the work let me engage with people who were smart and knew things I didn’t. The day-to-day work always involved new problems and new ways of drawing out the best efforts from other people. We were always taking risks—some of which didn’t pay off and some of which did. Most people don’t have even one job that has all those elements, and my friends thought I wouldn’t be able to avoid comparing my new work to what I had had at Microsoft.

The effort to eradicate polio received an influx of $635 million today to intensify vaccination campaigns in India and Nigeria over the next five years. Rotary International, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the governments of Germany and Britain provided this new money for the two countries that account for more than 80 percent of the remaining 1,633 polio cases. This is good news for the polio eradication effort, which has suffered setbacks, but could help polio to join smallpox on the list of eradicated diseases.

Polio has proved to be a challenging disease to eradicate. Polio often lies ‘silent’ in the body, which means that people may not show signs of illness and thus may not know they are infected. The virus can spread widely through a community during this time. Since polio causes paralysis in only 1 of 200 people, public health authorities may not be aware of the infection until it has spread extensively. Also, to successfully eradicate polio, all three strains of the virus must be eliminated. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) uses a vaccine that contains weakened forms of all three strains. This vaccine can successfully immunize people against future exposure to the polio virus and eventually lead to eradication.

Recognizing this potential, in 2005 the G8 committed to contribute $829 million between 2006 and 2008 to the polio eradication effort. Since then, donors have begun to close the financing gap. ONE’s 2008 Data Report describes this progress, and notes that the United States, followed by the UK and Japan have been the largest G8 donors to the GPEI. Hopefully, with this new $635 million donation to the fight against polio, eradication can become a reality.

-Lisa Fleisher

Earlier this year, malaria experts, prime ministers, presidents and celebrities joined together in New York to launch the Global Malaria Action Plan. This plan, if followed and funded, is supposed to lead us to a world without any deaths from malaria by 2015. This year, close to 900,000 people will die from the disease – 85% of them will be children under five in Africa.

In development, we can get a bit cynical about these big plans – there are many commitments made by donors that are not kept. But, the fight against malaria has a lot of momentum. Funding has increased significantly in the past few years; victories across Africa are showing that success is possible; and perhaps, the most significant step yet, a vaccine now looks possible.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (and their grantee, PATH’s Malaria Vaccine Initiative) and GlaxoSmithKline have worked together on a vaccine candidate that has now been shown to cut illnesses in infants and young children by more than half. These results were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $100 million supporting this initiative thus far. Though the vaccine still has to go through phase III trials, if all goes well, it could be ready for approval in 2011.

Having a working vaccine could change the map for malaria. Billions of people across the world live in areas that put them at risk for the disease. The possibility of a successful vaccine is reason for hope that the real progress being made fighting malaria will continue.

-Josh Lozman, Deputy Policy Director, ONE

Yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it will donate $17.6 million to ease the impact of the continuing global food crisis on the world’s poor.

From the Chronicles of Philanthropy

The largest grant, $10-million, will help the U.N. World Food Program feed young children and mothers in Niger, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso.

The additional money will be split among Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps, and Oxfam America to provide food, jobs, and assistance to farmers in poor countries.

“The current global food crisis requires immediate action to feed people most at risk,” said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, in a statement.

“In the longer term,” she said, “since agriculture and the needs of small-scale farmers in the developing world have been increasingly neglected in recent decades, we need a significant reinvestment in agricultural development from donors and developing countries that focuses on helping small farmers boost their yields and increase their incomes.”