Sunday, September 21, 2003
Gates fights a different bug
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.
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.
It ain't Mefloquine.
posted by chris at 9:14 PM
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