Bill Gates: Saving the World Is Within Our Grasp

[babylonsister]

Saving the World Is Within Our Grasp
The evidence is in: we can stop diseases like malaria and TB from killing millions of people each year.

By Bill Gates
Newsweek

Oct. 1, 2007 issue - Last year my wife, Melinda, and I visited an AIDS clinic in Durban, South Africa. We met women who had walked miles from nearby townships. When they arrived, they were greeted by a well-trained staff. There was an ample supply of antiretroviral drugs, which can help people with AIDS stay healthy for years. Patients were receiving counseling. As we chatted with one of the doctors in the clinic, it struck me: something was fundamentally different.
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Nearly a decade ago, when Melinda and I started our foundation, we would go to sub-Saharan Africa or developing countries in other regions and see health workers struggling with broken equipment and empty medicine chests. We walked down dirty hallways packed with exhausted mothers holding sick children. In those days, many took it as inevitable that millions of poor people would die each year from diseases that are preventable, treatable or no longer present in the developed world. But that's starting to change. Today governments, aid groups and communities are simply refusing to accept the notion that diseases like malaria and tuberculosis will haunt us forever. The evidence is in: these problems can be solved.

The world can point to a number of victories already. Smallpox is gone, of course, and polio nearly so. Thanks to the leadership of the Carter Center, we've virtually eliminated guinea-worm disease, an excruciatingly painful parasite that is ingested with tainted water. There are new treatments available for visceral leishmaniasis, also called black fever, which is second only to malaria as the world's deadliest parasitic killer.

Millions of lives have been saved through better financing and delivery of the medical advances available today. The GAVI Alliance has immunized 100 million children, averting some 600,000 deaths last year alone, and a creative approach to the bond markets has raised $1 billion more to buy more vaccines. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is saving 3,000 lives a day. That clinic we visited in Durban was made possible by an American program: PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Those lifesaving drugs, the salaries for the staff—even the prefab building—were all financed with American tax dollars.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20920343/site/newsweek/

[Warpy]

1. Bill, you'd do better to start at home

and follow the funding pattern established by the fascist Scaife to endow progressives. Only in that way can we possibly get progressives in government that would redefine our military's mission as a purely defensive one, slash the Pentagon budget, stop the worldwide arms race, and free up the money we'll need to solve problems at home and abroad.

That doesn't mean efforts against TB, malaria and HIV in the third world need be abandoned.

You're wealthy enough to work on both fronts.

[aquart]

2. It is not legal to wring his chicken neck.