Bill Gates and Chancellor George Osborne visited
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine today,
to announce their pledge of three billion
pounds to help the fight against Malaria.
Well I'm here in the Northern power house
with Bill Gates and we're jointly committing
three billion pounds to eliminate malaria
from the world by using great British science
like we see here in Liverpool.
We cannot just save lives but we can create
a more secure world, that's overwhelming in
Britain national interest and it's exactly
what people want to see our foreign aid budget
being spent on.
Britain will donate £500 million pounds of
its overseas aid budget over the next five
years, with a further £140 million pounds
contribution from The Gates Foundation.
Well Malaria's a terrible things, there's
hundreds of millions of people who get it,
it holds back economies, it kills over 600,000
children a year, almost 10% of all the children
that die before the age of five.
And we have some really great science, whether
it's Liverpool or Imperial or Oxford and pattern
institutions.
By taking this research money and coming up
with new interventions, the scientific community
has agreed that by 2040 we can get rid of
this disease.
And so for all the countries this would be
very very trans-formative, their kids would
grow up far more healthy, they could have
their own economies and be self sufficient
and we need to help them by getting rid of
this disease.
Describing Malaria as one of the world's highest
health priorities, the duo believe this contribution
could help eradicate the disease, which killed
438,000 last year.
