February 16, 2008 (LPAC)--The malaria sectional head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr. Arata Kochi, has accused the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in an internal memo written last year, of stifling research diversity and usurping the policy-making role of the WHO in the fight against malaria. The New York Times got hold of the memo as it was being circulated this week through health agency networks.
Kochi is outspoken about the compromising effect on research independence of funding scientists through giant private donor organizations, who have them "locked up in a cartel."
While the WHO has a total operating budget for all programs, worldwide, of just $4 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has single-handedly funded various malaria initiatives to the tune of some $120 million dollars in 2007 alone, according to their own granting list--including almost $40 million to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to develop a "coordinated research program to identify how best to optimize the delivery and cost-effectiveness of combination drug treatment for malaria in Africa and Asia...." In other funding, it also donated $105 million to set up the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the U. of Washington, with a mission to evaluate the cost effectiveness of various programs of disease control and prevention throughout the world--a role once thought to be the province of the WHO.
The new head of the U. of W. program, Dr. Christopher Murray, who once worked with the WHO, said of the Gates Foundation in a Sept. 14, 2007 interview in the Puget Sound Business Journal: "Everyone would agree that along with the World Bank and WHO and UNICEF, they are one of the most important organizations in global health. And they have been quite clever in the way they use their resources such that they have set the agenda on the research front, with drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, but they've also increasingly had a big influence on the general health policy agenda. And I suspect that that influence is only going to grow."
