y, we are not
alone. French doctors helped to found Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without
Borders, in 1971; it now operates in nearly sixty nations. Israeli doctors created Save a
Child's Heart, the world's largest global pediatric heart surgery program
newports cigarettes, which operates
in Africa, China, Jordan, Iraq
marlboro golds, Vietnam, and the former Soviet republics, and also treats
hundreds of Palestinian children.
Yet in 2006, every day around the world, 3
newport menthol 100s,000 children under the age of five
were dying from malaria; 1.5 million lives were lost each year. Hundreds of thousands of
children and adults were succumbing to malaria comas and never waking up. Malaria,
which is transmitted by a single mosquito bite, is a preventable disease. The United States
eradicated malaria from our swamps and lowlands in the early part of the twentieth
century; before then Washington had regular malaria outbreaks. George's great-
grandparents the Walkers, who lived in St. Louis, started going to Maine in the summer
to avoid malaria outbreaks along the Mississippi River.
In the twenty-first century, we know that systematic programs can wipe out the
mosquitoes and arrest transmission of the disease. Something as simple as sleeping under
a bed net or treating infested areas with insecticide can greatly reduce malaria outbreaks.
But in some of the poorest countries in the world, very little was being done to combat
malaria, which is every bit as deadly as AIDS. George wanted to change that. In June of
2005, he announced the President's Malaria Initiative, which focused on combating
malaria in fifteen of the world's hardest hit nations, where more than 80 percent of all
malaria deaths occur. To receive aid and funds, these nations' governments had to
become active partners in malaria eradication.
Eighteen months later, the President's Malaria Initiative was entering its next
phase. As we had done with Helping America's Youth, I wanted to get all of the
organizations that were addressing malaria to meet in the same room on the same day. On
December 14
new jean sale, for the first time, experts from the World Health Organization, the World
Bank, and UNICEF met with Admiral Tim Ziemer, director of the president's initiative
Golden Virginia Tobacco,
as well as with representatives from private foundations, such as Malaria No More and
the Gates Foundation, which was announcing $84 million in new grants; it had already
spent $682 million to combat the disease. They came together as part of the White House
Summit on Malaria, which I led at the National Geographic Society. Our goal was
simple: cut malaria deaths by one-half across these fifteen nations and share the resources
and knowledge to do it.
Already there were signs of progress. After the initiative began, communities on
the island of Zanzibar reportedly cut their infection rates from 45,000 cases to near zero
in a mere four years. When George left office, the overall number of malaria deaths
among children under five had dropped by one-third in both Zambia a