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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, September 22, 2003

Gates donates $168M for malaria research

Touring a malaria clinic where they sat on reed mats while coddling babies, Bill and Melinda Gates announced a $168 million grant Sunday to accelerate research into malaria, a disease that kills over a million people each year, most of them young African children.


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Touring a malaria clinic where they sat on reed mats while coddling babies, Bill and Melinda Gates announced a $168 million grant Sunday to accelerate research into malaria, a disease that kills over a million people each year, most of them young African children.

The grant, by the world's richest man and his wife, is the largest ever single donation towards fighting the mosquito-borne disease. Malaria is making a deadly comeback in Africa, the world's poorest continent, as strains of the disease become increasingly resistant to treatment.

"I hope we bring a message of commitment and optimism," said Gates, the Microsoft tycoon who has pledged to use much of his fortune to improve global health.

Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is for three research grants, with $100 million to go towards finding a vaccine, $28 million to use existing drugs to cut down the number of infections in babies and $40 million for the development of new medicines to combat drug-resistant strains.

Despite malaria's danger, research has been critically underfunded, campaigners against the disease say. Approximately $100 million is spent annually in malaria research, a fraction of what is used to research diseases like AIDS, the only disease that kills more people than malaria.

"Investment in malaria research is far short of the need," said Dr. Jong-Wook Lee, Director-General of the World Health Organization, in a statement. "These grants will allow many more researchers to aggressively pursue promising leads for malaria drugs and vaccines, and quickly move research from the lab to the field."

Up to 80 percent of malaria in parts of Africa is now resistant to Chloroqine, the cheapest standard drug against the disease. Other effective drugs are too expensive for most people in Africa.

Source: Agencies


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