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.
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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.
