Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - September 22, 2003
Marilyn Chase, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
World-wide, malaria sickens up to 500 million people a year and kills 1.2 million to 2.7 million people a year. Most are in Africa, including 3,000 African children who perish from the disease every day, the foundation said.
The announcement was made Sunday in Maputo, Mozambique, the first stop on a three-country tour that Mr. and Mrs. Gates are making to visit African health programs funded with grants out of their $25 billion global health war chest. The couple also will visit AIDS projects in Gaborone, Botswana, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Range of Remedies
The three grants totaling $168 million embrace a range of remedies from tools such as bed nets to keep mosquitoes away, to better use of old drugs, to new drug and vaccine research and clinical trials.
The first grant of $28 million over five years is awarded to support a program called Intermittent Preventive Treatment in infants, a clinical trial of three doses of sulfa drugs given to babies during routine vaccination visits at two to nine months of age. "We expect the children will have a 50% to 60% reduction in malaria in the first two years of life," said Regina Rabinovich, the foundation's infectious-disease chief.
The second grant totaling $40 million over five years will fund new drug research of the Medicines for Malaria Venture, a Geneva-based nonprofit foundation studying synthetic versions of artemisinin, a traditional Chinese botanical treatment. Cheaper and more potent than the plant derivative, the drug called synthetic peroxide could be in human clinical trials by 2004, said Christopher Hentschel, Geneva-based chief executive of the venture.
The lion's share of the grant money -- $100 million -- goes to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, based in Seattle and Rockville, Md. Melinda Moree, director, said her group is testing a GlaxoSmithKline PLC vaccine called RTS,S in Mozambique, and a vaccine developed by Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Kenya. They block the parasite's assault on the liver and red blood cells.
Huge Funding Gap
Malaria costs Africa $12 billion in lost gross domestic product, accounting for half of hospital admissions and consuming 40% of public health spending on the continent, the foundation said. A huge funding gap compounds the crisis.
"It's a terrible fact that [only] 10% of the $70 billion spent on health is devoted to diseases that cause 90% of the illnesses and deaths in the world," Mrs. Gates said in a briefing before the trip. But she added, "Africa's health problems are not in any way hopeless."
"Malaria strains are now resistant to inexpensive drugs like chloroquine," Mr. Gates noted. "We need new solutions."
On Monday in Johannesburg, the Gates couple plans to co-host a town-hall meeting on HIV and youth with former South African President Nelson Mandela. On Wednesday, they are scheduled to visit an AIDS prevention and treatment program in Gaborone.
Write to Marilyn Chase at marilyn.chase@wsj.com
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