Bill Gates, China Join Forces Against TB

(CBS/AP)  Bill Gates has set his sights on eradicating a virus, but it has nothing to do with the well publicized "Conficker" worm that threatens PC users. Gates's charitable foundation is teaming with the Chinese government in a $33 million project to test new ways to diagnose drug-resistant tuberculosis, as well as assess new treatments and better ways to track patients.

Gates made the announcement Wednesday in Beijing, where World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan warned that emerging, hard-to-treat strains of tuberculosis are set to spiral out of control.

Chan told health ministers and senior officials from 27 countries worst-affected by the new drug-resistant strains of TB that they must make dramatic improvements in detecting infections and build stronger health care systems.

"Call it what you may - a time-bomb or a powder keg," Chan said at the opening of a three-day meeting on drug-resistant TB in Beijing. "Any way you look at it, this is a potentially explosive situation."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation chose to fund the TB project in China because the scale of the problem is great and the government has the ability to set an example for the world, Gates said.

"Because of its skill, its scale, its TB burden, its love of innovation, and its political commitment to public health, China is a perfect laboratory for large-scale testing of new tools and delivery techniques to fight TB," Gates said at a news conference.

The project will initially cover 20 million people and then be expanded to 100 million people over five years, Gates said.

TB is caused by germs that spread when a person with active TB coughs, sneezes or speaks. It's ancient and treatable but now has evolved into stronger forms: multidrug-resistant TB, which does not respond to two top drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually untreatable.

Left unchecked, people with drug-resistant TB could potentially spread the disease to others, creating an epidemic in the highly mobile global economy. Even when detected, the infected have to switch to more potent and expensive medicines, posing a problem for many countries with underfunded health care systems.

Of the more than 9 million people around the world who contract tuberculosis every year, about 500,000 get multi-drug resistant TB.

Nearly a quarter of them are in China, where legions of rural migrants face an inadequate health care system.

It is also a problem in India, where rural health care is often poor and there is little control over the sale of anti-TB drugs; Russia, which faces a shortage of qualified medical staff and drugs; and South Africa, where the disease thrives amid an AIDS epidemic that has weakened the immune systems of people with HIV.

"I urge you to make the right policy decisions with appropriate urgency," Chan said to the officials. "At a time of economic downturn, the world simply cannot afford to let a threat of this magnitude, complexity and cost spiral out of control."

Chan said less than 5 percent of estimated cases of drug-resistant TB were being detected and fewer than 3 percent were being treated according to WHO standards.

Countries attending the meeting are expected to start drawing up five-year national plans to prevent and control the spread of drug-resistant TB. Many countries have been slow to act, said Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, in a statement ahead of the Beijing meeting.

"The slow progress in treating people" was especially striking because many of the at-risk countries have thriving economies, said MSF's Tido von Schoen-Angerer. "They have the capacity to act, and need to make this a priority and put people on treatment."

TB is usually treated in six months with a $20 cocktail of four antibiotics, but its drug-resistant form takes up to two years to fight. Chan said the cost of treating drug-resistant TB can be as much as 200 times higher than normal TB.

Detecting drug-resistant TB quickly improves the chances a patient will survive and lowers the risk that the disease mutates further into an even more drug-resistant form of the disease.

[mrjoshcan]

Now Johnny and I cannot recommend which treatment that Bill should follow, however, Melinda should be made aware of his medical problem and probably should abort any child bearing proposals, in that Bill's tuberculoses might inherit, bypassing through resistant blood line onto offspring. A generation without Gates might change history, as a matter of principality among who are the riches Americans, thus distributing capitalistic vantage for poor Chinese amid an influx of American competition at the University about having the greatest vialed source to combat a industry promotion of an underfunded health care system. In general, producing the more untreatable multidrug-resistant petri dish can in fact produce an even deadlier demise. Take the multiplied effort of the Polio vaccine for instance. Does Polio still inflict persons as rapidly spreading inside Human Immunodeficiency Virus? One more thing; Joe, Barrack, Steven, and Warren probably should be made aware about more throw-in-sufficient spending of their US dollars that accompanies more and more underdevelopment.

[whitemale08]

I guess China agrees to let Bill Gates practice eugenics on the Chinese people.

The Bill Gates foundation is a scam.

They hide behind 'charity' to practice sterilzation and eugenics by using poor people as guinea pigs.

[I_am_me1953]

From the above article, "Bill Gates has set his sights on eradicating a virus..."
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Good luck finding this virus, considering that TB is caused by the bacterium mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) and not a virus. This bcterium has been around longer than mankind and is not likely to go away anytime real soon.

Also related to M. Tuberculosis are Mycobacterium Leprae (M. leprae) the bacterium that causes leprosy, and Mycobacterium Bovis (M. Bovis), which caused TB in patients from drinking non-pasturized milk, the reason that Louis Pasteur invented the Pasturization process for milk.

[omega39-2009]

It would be nice if Gates helped out his fellow Americans once in a while. We're the ones being rooked for $300 operating systems and the money and jobs are flowing to places where piracy is running rampant.

[baileyccc]

The greatest man of our generation. Posted by Baileyccc