That message came right from the top Tuesday: Bill and Melinda Gates, the foundation’s co-chairs, who addressed hundreds gathered at the second Malaria Forum and celebrated the successes of those dedicated to malaria eradication.
The Gateses spoke during the second day of the forum, as participants from around the world came to Seattle to gather information from one another and from the representatives of organizations now involved in the fight against malaria. They also browsed such technical displays as “How to give a mosquito a blood meal.”
The Gateses — who have dedicated $1.75 billion to the effort — praised the group, which includes drug company leaders, scientists, researchers, African health leaders and public health officials from around the world.
Not only have they been working against a tough parasite, Melinda Gates said, but they face profound apathy for a fight against an age-old disease that everyone assumed would always kill millions of people, mostly children in sub-Saharan Africa.
“You really broke through that inertia,” Melinda Gates told the crowd. “Your boldness has really stoked our ambition.”
When the Gateses began the foundation a decade ago, she said, a fight against malaria really wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Families didn’t use bed nets, available drugs were essentially ineffective, and governments and health agencies were barely spending enough to control mosquitoes.
If you had asked any reasonable person back then to predict the course of events, they would have said “a lot more disease,” she said. “This community has really come together to avert that disaster.”
But both she and her husband emphasized that much, much more is yet to be done.
“Eradication is an ambitious goal, and a long-term goal,” Bill Gates said.
As the long-term goal, malaria eradication will take tools that have yet to be developed, and money that has yet to be dedicated. It will take building up health systems in countries that don’t have them now, and political commitment buffeted by the global financial troubles.
The vaccine now in trials in Africa is only partly effective. In preliminary results, researchers reported higher rates of meningitis and seizures in the vaccine group, compared with the trial group, although they said it appeared the meningitis was not related to the vaccine. More information will become available in the ongoing trials over the next three years, and others said the vaccine’s safety is within acceptable limits.
The vaccine, named RTS,S, developed jointly by GlaxoSmithKline and the Malaria Vaccine Initiative of PATH, is the first vaccine candidate to be tested against malaria.
Questioners during the forum have raised issues about what changes in natural immunity might result from widespread use of this or other vaccines, and about the need to make sure there is continued funding for health systems in underdeveloped countries, some of which have little health infrastructure.
To the Gateses and others, all this bolsters their belief that the fight is far from finished. Money put toward this fight needs to double and the speed of work needs to increase, Melinda Gates said. She said she and her husband spend a lot of time asking governments to pitch in on the effort.
“We are at the very early stages still of this disease,” she told the group. Although the road ahead is “long and arduous,” she said, “I’m filled with optimism about what we can accomplish.”
Bill Gates
Bill Gates
Bill Gates
Bill Gates
Bill Gates
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