Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

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A Global Health Scorecard Finds U.S. Lacking

Donald G.McNeil Jr. | The New York Times | May 22, 2017

Over the last 25 years, China, Ethiopia, the Maldive Islands, Peru, South Korea and Turkey had the greatest improvements in “deaths avoidable through health care at their economic level,” a complex but intriguing new measure of global mortality described last week in the Lancet. By that standard, the United States improved slightly over the same period, 1990 to 2015. But the American ranking is still so low that it’s “an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends $9,000 per person on health care annually,” said the report’s chief author, Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Bill Gates Won’t Save You From The Next Ebola

Robert Fortner | Huffington Post | April 30, 2017

In late August 2014, Tom Frieden, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traveled to West Africa to assess the raging Ebola crisis. In the five months before Frieden’s visit, Ebola had spread from a village in Guinea, across borders and into cities in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Médecins Sans Frontières, the first international responder on the scene, had run out of staff to treat the rising numbers of sick people and had deemed the outbreak “out of control” back in June...

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Bill Gates Won’t Save You From The Next Ebola Outbreak

Robert Fortner and Alex Park | HuffPost | May 1, 2017

In late August 2014, Tom Frieden, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traveled to West Africa to assess the raging Ebola crisis. In the five months before Frieden’s visit, Ebola had spread from a village in Guinea, across borders and into cities in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Médecins Sans Frontières, the first international responder on the scene, had run out of staff to treat the rising numbers of sick people and had deemed the outbreak “out of control” back in June...

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Cambodia Fights Malaria with Text Messages

Margaret Rock | Mobiledia | September 8, 2011

Cambodia is trying to contain the spread of malaria by using text messaging to report the disease in real time. Mobile devices are installed with "FrontlineSMS," an open-source software, allowing volunteers to send and receive malaria reports via text. The data is sent to the Malaria Information and Alert System in Phnom Penh and fed into a national database using Google Earth. Read More »

Grameen Foundation develops Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH)

Steven Overly | Washington Post | June 9, 2013

The Grameen Foundation was providing health care to pregnant women in Ghana in 2010 when the organization had an idea: As cellphones become more widely available in developing nations, health information can be quickly disseminated to poor patients in remote locations via voice and text messaging. Read More »

Malaria Kills 1.2 Million Annually, Double Previous Estimates

Christian Nordqvist | Medical News Today | February 6, 2012

Approximately 1.2 million humans die each year from malaria, a much higher figure than the previously estimated 600,000, researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, reported in The Lancet this week. The authors added that the majority of deaths occur in children under the age of 5 years, while 42% occur in adults and older children.

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NEXTGEN Cassava Project Sets Precedent For Open Access Data Sharing In Agricultural Research

Staff Writer | IPP Media | May 4, 2013

Six months after the launch of the $25.2M NEXTGEN Cassava project at Cornell University, scientists on the project have released Cassavabase, a database that promotes open access data sharing. Read More »

OpenMRS Community Announces Malawi will be the Host Country for OMRS17

OpenMRS Global Events Manager Christine Gichuki announced yesterday that Malawi has been chosen as the host country for the OpenMRS 2017 implemeters meeting (OMRS17). This is a major milestone for the OpenMRS project. OMRS16 was hosted by the government of Uganda last year. The conference was a major success as I decribed in a presentation at the recent OSEHRA 2017 meeting in Bethesda, Maryland. This will be the second OMRS meeting that is hosted the by a national goverment. The incredibly successful meeting in Uganda is described in this article.

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Why African Countries Need to ​​Invest in Research and Citizen Science​

Climate change, HIV/AIDS, recurring droughts, and food insecurity are some of the most pressing issues the African continent has had to deal with in 2016. These issues pose a significant threat to economic, social and environmental development in Africa and create health and economic challenges to the continent. Yet, all of these challenges can benefit from research results spinning off from African universities and research institutions. But to get these results, the institutions must have the funds...