Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
U.S. Will Give Mozambique $1 Billion to Fight HIV – The U.S. says it will provide $1 billion over the next five years to help fight AIDS in Mozambique, including strengthening the country’s health system and improving access to treatment. The goal is for the government, aid groups, and private sector to harmonize their efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. (VOA)
Pay attention to West African food crisis, says ambassador – U.S. ambassador Robin Renee Sanders argues that the international donor community needs to keep the food security situation in West Africa front and center so as to ensure that all vulnerable people have access to affordable, nutritional commodities to avoid any later crises. (Huffington Post)
Flying to the aid of Africans fighting illness – Journalist Caitlin Gibson interviews Johnathan Miller, founder of the Airborne Lifeline Foundation, a fleet of eight planes dedicated to transporting medical specialists and supplies to remote corners of Botswana to help villages combat HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. (The Washington Post)
South Africa wants to join BRIC nations – South Africa wants to be considered among the leaders of the developing world along with Brazil, Russia, India and China, its president said, pushing for his country to be the first African member of the informal group that has growing global influence. (AP)
New corn varieties could combat famine during drought – A recent study has found new breeds of “drought-tolerant” corn that could help farmers fight the effects of drought and provide food in periods of low rainfall, with the potential to save consumers more than $500 million in drought related price increases by 2016. (Michael Onyiego, VOA)
Merck provides new funding to fight HIV/AIDS in Botswana – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with pharmaceutical giant Merck to provide $60 million over the next five years to fight HIV/AIDS in Botswana, which has the second-highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the world. (Byron Butler, The Daily Tell)
Better farming improves lives, says Gates – Philanthropist Bill Gates describes the progress that six Gates Foundation grant-recipient organizations have made in revolutionizing farming in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Gates asserts that better farming is the most important solution for overcoming hunger and poverty, making it a priority of his foundation. (Huffington Post)
New experimental AIDS vaccine trial to start in Africa – Vaccine manufacturer Crucell NV plans to test its experimental AIDS vaccine in the U.S. and Africa. The vaccine combines shots in a “prime-boost approach” that’s designed to both kill infected cells and prevent HIV from entering those that are uninfected. (Simeon Bennett, Bloomberg)
Millions in Zimbabwe need food aid – A new U.N. report says while Zimbabwe’s food security situation has improved significantly, about 1.7 million people – more than 10 percent of the population – will still need assistance. The report calls for heightened involvement by international organizations in providing food assistance in the coming year. (Joe DeCapua, VOA)
South Africa Weighs Media Controls – South Africa’s ruling political party has proposed tighter controls for the media, sparking a noisy debate over the role of the press. Journalists accuse the controversial bill of safeguarding government information and preventing them from acting as government watchdogs. (Peter Wonacott, Wall Street Journal)
Mini-microscope may save lives in developing world – A portable, durable and inexpensive microscope that runs on AA batteries may help to promote early detection and successful treatment of tuberculosis in the developing world, particularly in community or rural health centers with limited infrastructure. (Stephanie Pappas, MSNBC)
Landslide Win Gives Rwanda’s Kagame Another Term – As a military leader, Paul Kagame helped bring an end to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He’s been president of a country that is now considered one of the more prosperous on the African continent. And this week, he won a landslide re-election that gives him another seven-year term. He talks to Renee Montagne about the challenges his country faces. (NPR)
Today a lot of people (including us at ONE) are celebrating the big news– via The Lancet– that two sets of clinical trials in Asia and Africa showed that new rotavirus vaccines can significantly reduce child deaths. Among those celebrating: Melinda Gates.
You might recall last October, Melinda Gates talked a bit about rotavirus in the Gates’ “Impatient Optimists” presentation:
Today she took to the Foundation Blog to write a bit more about the disease:
Knowing that we have simple, cost-effective ways to prevent something that rarely kills children in the developed world breaks my heart.
Let’s face it – no one likes talking about diarrhea. But we should be doing just that because we have the opportunity to save 4,000 children’s lives every day by preventing diarrhea-related illnesses. We have the tools to combat diarrheal disease and the fatal dehydration it can cause – and it’s my goal to see them used in much higher numbers than they are today.
While deaths from diarrhea have decreased globally due to vaccines, antibiotics, oral rehydration therapy, and improved water and sanitation, diarrheal diseases remain the second-leading cause of childhood death. Each year, diarrhea causes more than 1.5 million deaths in children under 5—nearly all of whom live in low-income countries.
Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrheal disease in children worldwide and is responsible for the deaths of more than 500,000 children each year. The rotavirus vaccine, common in the US and other developed countries, has been introduced in a few developing countries, and we hope that it will soon be available in many more.
This week, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are rolling out a series of blog posts, videos, and stories meant to highlight the fight against polio. The series kicked off with a blog post and video from Bill Gates, which you can check out here. (Video below).
Stay tuned to Foundation Notes, where they’ll be publishing new content on this issue throughout the week.
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.
Resources:
Cross-posted from the Gates Foundation website:
The G8 summit gets underway tomorrow in Muskoka, Canada. It’s exciting that a focus of the summit is a new G8 initiative – conceived and led by Canada – to improve maternal, newborn, and child health in poor countries.
G8 countries are expected to commit major resources toward the initiative. Other public and private donors are also lending support, including the Gates Foundation — we recently announced the foundation will make new grants totaling $1.5 billion over the next five years to support family planning, maternal and child health, and nutrition programs in developing countries.
The G8 commitments are an important landmark, but it’s more critical than ever to step up advocacy on global health. Right now there’s tremendous pressure in most donor countries to cut budgets, so we need to continue highlighting the fact that global health investments are working and are incredibly cost-effective. Maternal and child health is a great example – there’s very clear proof that low-cost solutions are saving lives, and can save many more if we expand effective programs.
This is a pivotal moment for women’s and children’s health. The task ahead is to be ready to make the most of the opportunity we created – to do the hard work of saving women’s and children’s lives. We must move forward together, as one, with the courage to overcome the obstacles that have stopped us in the past.
Our unity and our courage will be tested. Canada’s new initiative is the most ambitious effort on behalf of women’s and children’s health in history. And in a few weeks, the United Nations will publish its Joint Action Plan, leading up to the special session on the Millennium Development Goals in September. The whole world will be looking to us for leadership.
It will not be easy, but we must not fail. We are making a new world for poor women and children: a world in which every birth is a promise – a promise of a better future.
Check out groups like ONE and CARE for info about ways to make your voice heard.
Often the picture painted in the media of Africa, and global poverty more generally, is pretty negative yet that’s a bit misleading as that’s not the whole story …
Mark Suzman, acting president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote about this for the Huffington Post earlier this month. I just wanted to draw attention to the article as I think it sums things up nicely on where we’re at. Suzman focuses on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and argues that although there is clearly still a long way to go, there has been incredible progress made across Africa. Malawi has decreased its child mortality rate by 50 percent for example.
Suzman concludes that “as we reflect on the first decade of the Millennium Development Goals, we should celebrate how far we have come. There is a clear route to our final destination with good models for how even the poorest countries can ultimately meet each of the goals.”
There’s an important UN Summit on the MDGs in September where a roadmap will be drawn up on how to accelerate progress and meet the goals set. We’re already working hard on this here at ONE and you’ll hear more and more about this as we get closer to the New York Summit.
