Global Health Progress

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today will pump $34 million into a campaign against tropical diseases that can be cured with drugs that cost as little as 50 cents a person.

The Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, an initiative of the Washington-based nonprofit Sabin Vaccine Institute, will use the grant to fight parasitic diseases that blind and disable the world’s poorest people. The grant will be announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Ruth Madison, MPH, works as a technical advisor of the Health of Women and Children unit at Project HOPE, an international health education and humanitarian assistance organization. Ruth is the technical backstop for several Project HOPE child survival programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Ms. Corbett, the 2008 recipient of the Dr. Ron Stewart Award for Student Leadership in Global Health, believes measures to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child offer a ray of hope against a disease that has ravaged a continent. To put the scope of the problem in perspective, more babies are born with HIV in one clinic in Africa than in one year in the United States, Canada and England combined. But with the right interventions, these transmission rates are preventable.

The Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases today announced that it has received $34 million through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Sabin Vaccine Institute to step up the global effort to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). These debilitating and sometimes deadly diseases affect 1.4 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1.25 a day. With the new grant, the Global Network is launching a campaign to catalyze additional funding and will establish a global alliance to scale up NTD treatment and prevention efforts.

The death toll from the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe has now passed the 3 000 mark, the United Nation’s World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

On Wednesday, the WHO said a total of 3 028 people have died from the cholera outbreak and 57 702 have been affected since August.

Modifying the environment by using everything from shovels and plows to plant-derived pesticides may be as important as mosquito nets and vaccinations in the fight against malaria, according to a computerized analysis by MIT researchers.

In a letter inspired by billionaire Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders, Bill Gates issued a 20-page look at the state of his foundation, saying it will give out a record amount of money this year even though the stock-market rout has hurt its endowment.

In the letter, aimed at partners of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Gates said the value of the charity’s endowment dropped 20% in 2008, faring better than many of its peers and many large investment funds. Mr. Gates didn’t disclose the current size of the foundation’s endowment, but the drop implies a value of $30 billion to $31 billion.

Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in his role as an Ambassador for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, discussed his views on the potential role that medical diplomacy can play in improving America’s global standing. He also shared some insights from recent visits to Rwanda and Tanzania and the consequences of the financial crisis on global health policy.

There will be as many as one and a half million orphaned children in Zambia by 2010. Deprived of adult guardians by the AIDS pandemic, many of these children will end up living in the streets of the country’s major towns and cities.

The government disputes the size of the problem. According to figures released by the Central Statistical Office in 2007, there are only about 85,000 orphans and vulnerable children in Zambia. But the United Nations International Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF) and other international humanitarian aid agencies put the present figure at over one million.

Peter Hotez and former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson call upon public-health and foreign-policy communities to embrace medical diplomacy and NTD control as a means to combat terrorism.