Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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Gates Foundation opens the doors, a crack, with new visitor center
Keith Seinfeld / KPLU
Even in the restrooms at the new visitor center, the learning goes on. The images on the doors are of a "home latrine in village of Kushumhi, Uttar Pradesh, India," according to the inscription.
If you’ve ever been past the huge new Gates Foundation campus near Seattle Center and wondered what goes on inside – your time has come.
The foundation is opening up its doors, at least a little bit. This weekend, a new visitor center opens to the public.
How Jimmy Carter became a serpent slayer and global health pioneer
Tom Paulson
President Jimmy Carter speaks at World Affairs Council 60th Anniversary event
Former President Jimmy Carter is in Seattle, having spoken last night at the World Affairs Council’s 60th anniversary celebration and speaking today at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about Guinea worm.
Mike Urban, mikeurbanart.com
A Nigerian woman with Guinea Worm
Guinea worm is a human parasite that eats its way through the human body and emerges a year later, incapacitating people with the pain of completing its life cycle. It’s horrible.
I’ve seen people with Guinea worm in Africa. Over the years, I’ve also seen what Jimmy Carter and his team at the Carter Center have done to come close now to completely ridding the world of this horrific disease.
It’s a great story, and perhaps of much broader significance to global health than many might realize.
Earlier this week, the Gates Foundation, major pharmaceutical companies and others announced a major $$785 million push against “neglected tropical diseases.” This was celebrated by Bill Gates, World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan and others as a critical turning point in global health. The Carter Center got some of the loot, $40 million of it, to finish off Guinea worm.
But in one sense, this push against neglected diseases got a good first shove nearly 30 years ago by Jimmy Carter. One look at the Carter Center’s website shows they got to this point, of recognizing the need to fight neglected diseases, decades ago.
Diseases like river blindness, Guinea worm, parasitic (lymphatic) elephantiasis and schistosomiasis have been in Carter’s cross hairs since the mid-1980s. Continue reading
Gates Fdn’s Tweets reveal passive, insular global health community
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is hosting a number of events today in anticipation of the opening of the philanthropy’s new public visitor center. Social media, and media in general, will play a big role in it.
If they use Twitter or Facebook to tell people about it, chances are the story will look like this:
Marc Smith, Connected Action
A snapshot of the Gates Foundation's Twitterverse
That’s a Twitter Map (here’s a more readable but huge link) made by Marc Smith, a sociologist who studies online communities, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation and former chief of Microsoft Research’s community technologies group.
The map, he says, indicates a fairly insular and uncommunicative bunch of folks.
“It’s mostly just an echoing of the Gates Foundation,” said Smith. “There’s not a lot of response, or engagement. Basically, it looks like people preaching to the choir.”
Seattle’s Party with a Purpose is on again, as ‘Agency’
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Global health is sexy.
At least in Seattle. The best evidence of this perhaps has been the annual Party with a Purpose, a celebration sponsored by the Washington Global Health Alliance and lavishly funded by donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing and others. This year, the party’s name is changing to Agency.
Why? Here’s what the artists formerly known as Partying Purposefully say:
“Agency means taking action on behalf of others. Agency is founded in the belief that focusing the power of young adults for the betterment of a single global health cause, even just for one night, can lead to world-changing progress.”
Aimed primarily at the younger set, the idea behind this event is to combine a spectacular, posh night out with educational and fund-raising activities devoted to a particular issue in global health. Organizers bravely launched the event with a focus on diarrhea and last year took up tuberculosis.
This year, the party is July 14 and they will focus on a University of Washington organization, Health Alliance International, working with mobile phones to improve maternal and child health.
Here’s a video pitch from lead organizer Kristen Eddings:
Announcing Agency from WGHA on Vimeo.
Note: Some have raised questions about the actual impact of these celebrations, if not the conflicting message they send — as I noted to much consternation last year. Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!
What I can say in defense of the idea of partying about diseases of poverty is it’s a heck of a lot better than ignoring these issues.
So party on!
A word to the wise: These events have sold out both times so if you want to go, better get your tickets as soon as they go on sale. I’m told it will be sometime in April.
Gates initiative on “neglected diseases” advances cause, but neglects key questions
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced, together with more than a dozen drug makers and others, a new initiative aimed at fighting a select group of mostly developing world ailments called “neglected tropical diseases” such as river blindness, parasitic elephantiasis and others.
Uniting to Combat NTDs
These diseases affect an estimated 1.4 billion people, killing perhaps half a million a year, but have not been high on the global health radar screen. As Dr. Peter Hotez writes for Huffington Post, for only 50 cents per child many of these diseases may now be eliminated.
The new public-private initiative aims to rid the world of 10 of these diseases by 2020.
It’s widely regarded as a positive step forward for global health, but there are some important questions that went unanswered:
- What is a neglected disease? This is actually a hotly debated question in global health circles right now.
- Many think the solution to fighting diseases of poverty should be to focus on poverty as much as on disease. Will this initiative get at the root problem or just address symptoms?
We’ll get back to the neglected issues of neglected diseases in a bit. First, more on the news:
For this initiative called the London Declaration on Neglected Diseases, the Gates Foundation pledged $363 million to support research into new treatments. Drug makers like GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and others have likewise pledged to step up research as well as to expand donation programs of medications to poor countries.
Others involved in the initiative include the World Bank, the United Arab Emirates as well as the U.S. and U.K. governments The total estimated commitment is $785 million. Continue reading
Gates Foundation boosts funding and confidence in troubled Global Fund
World Economic Forum
Bill & Melinda Gates at Davos 2010
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged another $750 million to the ‘troubled’ Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Associated Press Gates Injects $750 Million in Troubled Global Fund
Washington Post Gates Injects $750 Million in Troubled Global Fund After Director Resigns
Troubled seems to be part of the Global Fund’s official title these days.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that the head of the Global Fund, Michel Kazatchine, quit due to funding cuts. That’s not quite right. It is true that this initiative created to fight AIDS, TB and malaria has seen funding decline as donors have reneged on their promised pledges.
Kazatchine appears to have resigned largely due to the allegations of mismanagement and tolerance of corruption in an internal shake-up. Some accused donors of using these allegations — which seemed to me a bit hyped as I wrote here and here — as an excuse not to come through with the promised funds.
The subsequent failure of donors and governments to follow through on funding to the Global Fund following this flap made Canadian politician and former UN AIDS ambassador Stephen Lewis absolutely apoplectic.
All this makes the announcement today by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland very welcome news to many in the global health community. Davos is the same place he and Melinda announced more than a decade ago that they were giving the same amount of money to launch the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).
Here’s a series of reports from 2001, in the wake of that announcement, I wrote for the Seattle PI.
There just seems to be something the Gateses like about announcing global funds at Davos and giving that $750 million figure. Some saw GAVI as a model for the later creation of the Global Fund.
Both are collaborative international projects that award grants to poor countries based on their performance in combating diseases of poverty — one aimed at fighting the top three killers and the other aimed at boosting childhood vaccinations in poor countries.
Both have trouble with “fraud and mismanagement” which, to some extent, comes from them handing over more control of in-country operations to, uh, countries not known for doing too well at combating fraud and mismanagement. But if the subcontractor shirks on the plumbing, the contractor pays for the leaks.
After the Gates announcement, Sarah Boseley at The Guardian raised an interesting question in her article today The Global Fund – saved and wrapped in a US flag?
With the Gates Foundation stepping in where the international community has stepped back, Boseley asks if the Global Fund risks becoming a bit too unilateral, less European. That may sound petty from an American perspective, but it’s not. These initiatives really can only succeed if they are truly multilateral.
Politics aside: Between these two funds over the past decade, more than 10 million deaths have been prevented and some disease rates in poor countries have been significantly reduced. Not a bad return.
Here’s a pretty good video from the Global Fund making its case with a little help from Bono, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and others (many of whom who are probably now in Davos):
Associated Press: Gates calls for more money for ag research
The Associated Press
A farmer checks his hybrid maize crop in Catandica, Mozambique.
KIRKLAND, Wash. — Bill Gates says high tech approaches to agriculture are an important tool for fighting hunger.
Gates released his fourth annual letter Tuesday, detailing the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable foundation. It made grants totaling $2.6 billion in 2010, spending heavily to improve health and the fight hunger in poor nations.
Gates lamented that more money isn’t spent on agriculture research and noted that of the $3 billion spent annually on work on the seven most important crops, only 10 percent focuses on problems in poor countries.
He says given the central role food plays in human welfare and national stability, it’s shocking, short-sighted and potentially dangerous how little money is spent on agricultural research.
From Gates’ letter:
“The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.”
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