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New $1.5 billion fund boosts fight against malaria

by Astrid Zweynert | azweynert | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 24 November 2015 11:38 GMT

* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The fight against malaria has been given a big boost with news that Britain will create a £1bn fund ($1.5bn) to combat the mosquito-borne killer disease in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The fund is named after Sir Ronald Ross, who became the first British Nobel laureate in 1902 for his discovery that mosquitoes transmit malaria.

The Ross Fund will include £90m to eradicate malaria; £100m for research and development into infectious diseases; and £115m to develop new drugs, diagnostics and insecticides for malaria, tuberculosis and to combat other infectious disease resistance.

It will also fund work to target diseases with epidemic potential, neglected tropical diseases, and diseases with emerging resistance.

"A staggering 1 billion people are infected with malaria and 500,000 children die from the (disease) each year. Eradicating malaria would save 11 million lives so today's announcement … is an important step to help tackle this global disease," British finance minister George Osborne said in a statement released on Sunday.

Osborne said Britain's commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid meant Britain could continue to play its part in the fight against malaria.

Despite huge progress in fighting malaria the disease still causes one in 10 child deaths in Africa and costs the continent's economies around £8bn every year.

Insecticide-treated bednets, rapid diagnosis and effective medicines have cut malaria death rates by 60 percent since 2000 but said funding must be tripled to battle a disease that still threatened nearly half the world's people, particularly Africans, the United Nations said in September.

The World Health Organisation has said that global malaria control is one of the great public health success stories, but that the disease still claims hundreds of thousands of lives, mostly children, each year.

"Achieving the eradication of malaria and other poverty-related infectious diseases will be one of humanity's greatest achievements," Bill Gates said in a statement. He said the fund would help reach that goal by leveraging the weight of public and private financing while using the skill and expertise of British scientists.

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