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Bill Gates Donates $100M to U.N. Group to Fight AIDS
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday donated $100 million to an international health fund to fight AIDS and called on European Union nations and other countries to make further contributions.
The announcement of the contribution to the global fund was made ahead of a key U.N. conference on AIDS to be held next week in New York.
The fund was proposed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in April, when he called for a "war chest" of $7 billion to $10 billion annually to halt AIDS, which has hit Africa hardest and become the continent's primary killer.
The Microsoft founder has also donated $126 million to an earlier AIDS initiative and $750 million in the past five years to boost global immunization efforts and to research new medicine. Some 3 million children a year die from vaccine-preventable diseases.
"We believe that there is no higher priority than stopping transmission of this deadly disease," said Bill Gates in a statement announcing the new donation.
The Gates foundation's assets topped $22 billion in 2000 and it gave away almost $1 billion.
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