2005-2-6
I'm Gwen Outen with the VOA Special English Development Report.
The world's richest man is giving away more of his money to fight
diseases in the world's poorest countries. The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation recently announced a gift of seven hundred fifty
million dollars. The money will go, over ten years, to the Global
Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization through its Vaccine Fund.
The gift will support national programs in seventy-two countries
to protect children against several diseases.
The Gates Foundation also gave seven hundred fifty million
dollars to the Vaccine Fund in nineteen ninety-nine. These are the
largest grants the foundation has made yet.
Bill Gates is chairman of Microsoft, which makes the operating
system on most personal computers.
Another Gates Foundation gift announced last month will go to
malaria research. Nearly forty-three million dollars will help
support what is described as the first non-profit drug company in
the United States.
The company, OneWorld Health, will work with Professor Jay
Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley. He hopes to
create a so-called bacteria factory at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory to grow artemisinin. This is the medicine that
the World Health Organization considers the most promising new drug
to fight malaria.
It is now made from a plant that grows in Asia. But the drug is
in short supply. The goal is to grow artemisinin another way, in a
laboratory, to provide a low-cost new cure for malaria.
The gift happened to be announced a week before the death of the
man considered the father of modern malaria research. William
Trager, an American, was ninety-four years old.
William Trager found a way to grow the most deadly form of
malaria in a laboratory. Yet, almost thirty years later, scientists
are still working on a vaccine to prevent the disease. The W.H.O.
says mosquitoes spread malaria to about three million people per
year. More than one million of them die. Most who die are young
children in Africa.
In Senegal, a two-day music event by African artists is being
organized to support the Roll Back Malaria Partnership. That is an
international effort to cut the number of malaria cases in the world
in half by two thousand ten. The concert is planned for March
twelfth and thirteenth in Dakar.
This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Jill
Moss. I'm Gwen Outen.