 Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates last night gave $258m (£145m) to the fight against malaria, branding the rich world's efforts in tackling the disease "a disgrace". The grant is equivalent to more than three-quarters of global spending on research into the disease last year, according to a report published simultaneously by the Malaria Research and Development Alliance. Malaria causes an estimated 500m bouts of illness a year, kills an African child every 30 seconds, and costs an estimated $12bn a year in lost income. But the MRDA report stated that global spending on malaria research last year totalled just $323m, about a tenth of the funding that would be needed to match its 3% share of the global disease burden. Mr Gates said that the world had failed to fight the "all-out war" on the disease. "For too long malaria has been a forgotten epidemic," he said. "It's a disgrace that the world has allowed malaria deaths to double in the last 20 years, when so much more could have been done to stop the disease. |
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 Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC. The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply. Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village. His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year. A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia. Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT. The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state. Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007. |
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 Developing countries demand share of control. US says urge to censor underlies calls for reform
A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America demanding to maintain a key role in the network it helped create and other countries demanding more control.
The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.
At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the internet's address structure, called the domain name system (DNS), which enables communication between the world's computers. It is managed by the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) under contract to the US department of commerce.
A meeting of officials in Geneva last month was meant to formulate a way of sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on November 16-18. A European Union plan that goes a long way to meeting the demands of developing countries to make the governance more open collapsed in the face of US opposition.
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 The world's poorest people are being denied access to drugs
The world's poorest people are being denied access to drugs because pharmaceutical companies are focusing their resources on diseases suffered by wealthy, middle-aged Americans, such as obesity and heart disease, a leading expert will say tomorrow.
Dr David Rhodes, the Health Protection Agency's (HPA) head of business development, will claim that spiralling costs are driving firms to invest primarily in drugs that tackle diseases of 'older Americans'.
As a result, the international market has been flooded with medicines to treat 'American diseases' such as high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease and cancer, while drugs to tackle tuberculosis, malaria and water-borne diseases prevalent in the poorest countries have been neglected.
Presenting his research at the HPA's annual conference tomorrow, Rhodes will show that more and more pharmaceutical companies are moving their headquarters to the US in search of profits. Once there, they pump money into treatments that help the local population to live longer.
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 The world's richest countries are failing to provide the funds needed for education in the developing world, the Global Campaign for Education has said. The campaign group's report was published during ministerial meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington. The delegates are set to discus efforts to achieve universal primary education. World leaders have agreed a target of providing primary education for all children by 2015.
It was part of the Millennium Development Goals agreed at a United Nations summit five years ago.
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The new study, published in Nature by a team from the University of Oxford1 is considered to provide the most comprehensive and realistic estimates on malaria to date. Researchers now estimate that there may have been up to 660 million clinical cases in 2002 alone (over 1 million new cases each day), doubling existing WHO estimates for Africa and more than tripling estimates for countries outside of Africa.
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January 2005, Nina Strenitz ~ STWR Carol Bellamy, UNICEF Executive Director, has recently launched the 2005 UNICEF report "Childhood under threat", a comprehensive and all encompassing report on the state of the world's children. The facts uncovered by the report are devastating: 15 years have lapsed since the convention of children's rights was passed, children have never been so high on the public agenda and yet, the initial promises seem broken. "Childhood under threat" uncovers that at least half of the world's children are severely deprived of one or more of the basic necessities: |
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