Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced it will donate 500 million US dollars (R3.5 billion) over the next five years to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates flew to Pretoria on Tuesday to discuss the AIDS pandemic with President Thabo Mbeki.

A Bethesda foundation developing vaccines for tuberculosis plans to announce a deal today with a large drug company to move forward with human tests of a promising new injection it hopes will prove useful in poor countries.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation yesterday awarded grants totaling $4.6 million to the Institute of OneWorld Health to fund drug development for two neglected parasitic diseases. The foundation is giving $4.2 million to the institute for a joint project with the World Health Organization and the International Dispensary Association to further development of a new drug for visceral leishmaniasis, a disease sometimes known as black fever that threatens over 350 million people across the globe. Another $476,100 is to enable the institute to finish testing of a drug to fight Chagas disease, which kills 50,000 people annually in Latin America and afflicts more than 16 million worldwide. Sally Stansfield, the foundation's acting infectious diseases and vaccines chief, said a current West Nile virus outbreak in the United States reminds us all that we are interconnected across borders and oceans and that we must never neglect efforts to prevent these infectious diseases (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation release, Aug. 14).