GHG receives $15 million grant for its malaria elimination campaign

UC San Francisco’s Global Health Group has received a $15 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a pioneering effort to help nearly three dozen countries eliminate malaria within their borders. Spread throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, the countries represent the boundary between regions that have already eliminated the disease and areas that are still struggling to control it.

With effective interventions, adequate financing, and political commitment, these countries could interrupt malaria transmission and eliminate the disease within five to 10 years, according to Sir Richard Feachem, KBE, FREng, DSc(Med), PhD, who directs the UCSF Global Health Group, which is part of UCSF Global Health Sciences. This would enable the global malaria community to focus its resources on a core group of tropical countries where it will take longer to eliminate the disease.

“Ninety-three countries have eliminated malaria since 1900, and we have recently seen unprecedented momentum in the 100 countries with remaining transmission,” Feachem said. “We and our partners across the globe will do everything possible to continue this remarkable progress towards global eradication. Our priority is to ensure that the 34 eliminating countries have the resources, policies, and tools to free themselves from malaria.”

The new grant includes political, financial, scientific and operational research components. These include urging world leaders to embrace malaria elimination as a priority and back that with funding for anti-malaria campaigns; developing new tools to detect infections and respond to them effectively; and discovering better ways of tracking the disease, so experts will know where the remaining problem areas are and when it has truly been eliminated.

Read full press release on the ucsf.edu website. Bay Area researchers help fight malaria on ABC News.