As I was watching the Gates Malaria Forum's "Town Hall" yesterday evening (entire day's webcast), I was struck by an anecdote told by Brian Greenwood, Professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine:
When Sir Ian McGregor was working in the Gambia, of the children who came to the clinic there with malaria, 80% had a positive blood film; 10 years ago it was 40% of those that had clinical malaria had a positive blood film; last year it was 4 percent.
by Amy DiElsi
Melinda Gates, Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, opened the Gates Malaria Forum in Seattle this morning with a call to embrace the effort to eradicate malaria. While many have been cautious to declare full eradication of the disease as the ultimate goal, Melinda urged the scientists, researchers, and advocates in the room to join Gates in this new endeavor in order to limit the human and financial costs and to ensure that we don't allow the malaria parasite to continue to adapt to new preventions and treatments. Melinda talked about her past trip to Zambia where she met a young girl sick with malaria. The girl and her family were waiting for an ambulance to take her to get the care she needed to survive. She doesn't know if the young girl made it to the hospital in time. Melinda said, "No child should die of malaria in today's world." She added, "Any goal short of eradicating malaria is accepting malaria." More
On the heels of World Food Day, highlighting the "inherent human right of every woman, man, girl and boy, wherever they live on this planet" to food, comes news that the head of the World Food Program in Somalia, Idris Osman, has been abducted by government troops, in turn highlighting the danger that UN workers on the ground endure in an attempt to guarantee that right. (You'll no doubt remember that earlier this month, 10 UN peacekeepers were killed in Sudan.) In Somalia WFP workers also have had to deal with a festering insurgency lead by the Union of Islamic Courts and clan-based militias and piracy off the horn of Africa that threatens 80 percent of aid delivery. Despite those difficulties, WFP workers had been engaged in a campaign to deliver aid to 2 million Somalis (that work has been temporarily suspended due to this abduction).
In Seattle today, 250 leaders in the malaria space interacted at the first ever Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Malaria Forum. Leadership from vaccine research, drug research, vector control, social mobilization and advocacy were convened by the Gates Foundation to share successes, ideas and frustrations in the road towards a significant reduction in malaria morbidity and mortality. Regina Rabinovich, Director of Infectious Diseases Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, opened the forum with a focus on great opportunity to build on progress and an elusive tool called momentum. The theme of the Forum is Collaboration, Innovation, and Impact. It is certainly innovative to have researchers, scientists, development workers, fundraisers and advocates engaged in the same conversations.
In part due to the good arguments made in these two posts (here and here), I just created a full-text RSS feed for UN Dispatch. For those of you who are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, check out this primer. It's worth your time. Personally I use (and heartily recommend) Google Reader as my news reader.
Although most headlines today will read the other way around, it's importantly not to overlook that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been central to coalescing the "scientific consensus," or what the public would recognize as the "scientific consensus." (Hear Climate Expert Richard Moss's assessment of the IPCC working group I report.) It's hard to image that we'd even be where are now without such effort. The Nobel Committee said as much in its announcement:
Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.
The new (and young) UK Foreign Minister David Milliband is blogging and appears to be doing it well. He's making an effort to directly connect with other bloggers. As Blake noted, he sat down with Steve, Sameer, Blake, and I at an event coordinated by UN Dispatch when he was in town for the opening session of the UN General Assembly. And, he's directly responding to comments. Yesterday, he defended the UN.
Quite a few of the comments on the blog so far have attacked the UN for various failings. It's not a perfect institution -- shock. It should be reformed -- of course. But don't fall for the argument that because it's not perfect it is not valuable. The UN deploys the second-largest number of troops and police (over 80 000) and in operating 15 peacekeeping and political missions around the world. It organises peace negotiations for the some of the most difficult places -- Darfur coming up. Its development fund has sponsored projects in over 100 countries for women's health and safety. It raises more than $2 billion a year for devastating natural and humanitarian disasters. It oversees criminal tribunals on Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Lebanon. Immunisation rates for the six major vaccine-preventable diseases are up to over 75%. And it has unique authority to speak for decent opinion around the world.
