UK joins hands with Bill Gates to 'eradicate' malaria

The UK government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pledged 3 billion pounds over the next five years to "eradicate" malaria.
UK Chancellor George Osborne and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced the new funding plan at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) today.
The government will contribute 500 million pounds per year from its foreign aid budget for the next five years, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation adding around USD 200 million annually.
The 3 billion pounds total will be used for the World Health Organisation's goal of reducing malaria deaths by 90 per cent by 2030.

"We are optimistic that in our lifetimes we can eradicate malaria and other deadly tropical diseases, and confront emerging threats, making the world a safer place for all," Osborne and Gates wrote in a joint article in 'The Times'.
"When it comes to human tragedy, no creature comes close to the devastation caused by the mosquito. We both believe that a malaria-free world has to be one of the highest global health priorities," they say.

The money will go into the Ross Fund, named after Sir Ronald Ross, the British scientist who won a Nobel Prize in 1902 for proving that mosquitoes transmitted malaria.

Osborne and Gates, who have both just returned from Davos after attending the World Economic Forum, warn that the disease is closely linked to poverty.
They say: "In the world's poorest places, malaria is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. It costs Africa, where poverty is already high, billions of pounds each year in lost productivity, and it accounts for up to 40 per cent of public health expenditure in high-burden countries.
"The world has cut the number of malaria deaths in half in the past 15 years. We are confident that this is a war we can win. With its world-class universities, pharmaceutical companies and strong support at the national level, the UK leads innovation to improve the health and wellbeing of millions."

There were 438,000 malaria deaths in 2015, most of them of children aged under five, and the majority of them in Africa, according to the World Health Organisation.
Efforts to control the disease have made significant progress in the last 15 years, but are threatened by the spread of resistance to antimalarial drugs and to insecticide, the WHO said in its 'World Malaria Report' 2015.