In a major address today to international health officials, Bill Gates said the world now has a "historic chance" to achieve dramatic improvements in health, and called on governments, the scientific community, and the private sector to more aggressively fight the diseases that affect hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people each year.
Emphasizing the urgent need to accelerate research on neglected diseases, Gates also announced that the Gates Foundation will more than double funding for the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, an effort launched in 2003 to develop solutions to 14 major scientific challenges that, if solved, could lead to breakthrough advances in global health. The foundation will provide an additional $250 million for the initiative, bringing its total commitment to $450 million.
"I'm an optimist," Gates said in his plenary speech to the World Health Assembly, an annual gathering of the world's top health officials. "We have a historic chance to build a world where all people, no matter where they're born, can have the preventive care, vaccines, and treatments they need to live a healthy life."
"There is a tragic inequity between the health of people in the developed world and the health of those in the rest of the world," Gates said. "I am here to talk about how the world, working together, can dramatically reduce this inequity. Never before have we had anything close to the tools we have today to both spread awareness of the problem and discover and deliver solutions."
Gates called for action on four priorities for improving global health:
- Political leadership: All governments, both rich and poor, must significantly increase their efforts to improve global health, and match their commitments to the scale of the crisis.
- Research: Much more scientific research must be directed toward developing solutions for the diseases that primarily affect developing countries.
- Delivery: Far greater attention and funding should be devoted to delivering the health tools that exist today, and to designing new health tools that are practical and affordable for the developing world.
- Market incentives: Governments must create guaranteed markets to provide the private sector with incentives to invest in the discovery and delivery of health tools for the developing world.
Gates Foundation More Than Doubles Funding for Grand Challenges Initiative