Gates Foundation gives $133 million for children's, women's health
A variety of nonprofit medical efforts in developing nations will benefit from $133 million in grants recently awarded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The lead recipient is Save the Children, which will get a five-year, $50 million grant for the nonprofit group's international "Saving Newborn Lives" initiative. This effort will use low-cost medical technologies to help reduce the estimated 5.4 million newborn deaths annually worldwide. This grant also is Save the Children's largest private gift in its history.
The Gates Foundation has presented a $25 million grant to the new Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, an offshoot of the World Health Organization."Stop TB" initiative. The Global Alliance was created to help develop new drugs to fight TB. The initiative stems from an October meeting of leading medical researchers, who called for a $500- to $600-million trust fund to help fight the disease, now the leading cause of infectious diseases deaths for adults.
Other recipients include:
$25 million to Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), to help the group establish a public-private venture to develop anti-malarial. MMV's goal is to register one new anti-malarial drug every five years, starting in 2010.
$18 million to the
Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute to partner with the Medical Helminthology Laboratory at Yale University for development of a hookworm vaccine. Hookworm infections are one of the main causes of anemia and malnutrition worldwide.
$15 million to the Infectious Disease Research Institute, to help develop a vaccine for leishmaniasis, a skin and visceral disease endemic in Southern Asia. The Institute will work closely with Corixa, a biotechnology company. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), leishmaniasis causes an estimated 500,000 deaths annually and an estimated 15 million new cases of the disease occur each year.
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation has estimated assets estimated of more than $21 billion. Its mission is to improve lives "by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community."
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