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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, January 27, 2003

Bill Gates Announces $200M Health Grant

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $200 million to identify critical questions about the leading causes of death in developing countries and to create an international competition to entice scientists to solve them.


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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $200 million to identify critical questions about the leading causes of death in developing countries and to create an international competition to entice scientists to solve them.

The aim is to save many of the millions of lives lost each year to malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition and other pressing health problems, Mr. Gates said in announcing the grant Sunday at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In speaking there, Mr. Gates, the founder of Microsoft, underscored the effects of poor health in stifling the economies of developing countries.

In creating the grant, Mr. Gates said he had been inspired by the success of a German, David Hilbert, who challenged his fellow mathematicians in 1900 to solve 23 problems over the next century. Dr. Hilbert's challenge led to mathematical breakthroughs, opened up fields of study and contributed to the development of computers.

The grant, Mr. Gates said, also aims at shattering public and scientific complacency about the largely ignored diseases of the third world, and at shifting the priority of research on health problems affecting the four billion people living in poor countries, two-thirds of the world's population.

Only 10 percent of medical research is devoted to the diseases that cause 90 percent of the world's health burden, Mr. Gates said. Most research is focused specifically on "rich world" diseases, he said, or at a basic level that does not directly apply to third world problems.

The panel is to publish its list of priorities this summer before opening competition to solve them. The grants will be administered by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Agencies




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