Gates Foundation vows $75m to probe emerging world child deaths

Bill Gates urged the international community to invest more in disease surveillance as his foundation committed $75m to set up a network to investigate childhood deaths in developing countries.

The Microsoft founder and philanthropist said the Ebola epidemic in west Africa was a "wake-up call" that highlighted the need for better monitoring of global health threats.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced the launch of a disease surveillance network in Africa and south Asia aimed at gathering more accurate data about the causes of childhood deaths.

This would help the global health officials match resources with needs in the long-term battle against childhood mortality while also improving monitoring and the ability to respond to emergencies such as the Ebola epidemic.

"The world needs better, more timely public health data," said Mr Gates, pointing to the absence of laboratories in west Africa as one of the reasons why the international response to Ebola was so slow.

"When we want to know something in Africa, we have to fly in expensive western personnel and equipment," he told the Financial Times.

The six surveillance sites being set up by his foundation would start to address this problem by building local capabilities, he added. The sites' locations are still to be determined but all would be in areas of high childhood mortality across sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.

The long-term aim was to expand the network to 20 centres but this would need support from other donors, Mr Gates said.

The initiative, called the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (Champs), is being developed by the Gates Foundation in partnership with the Emory Global Health Institute in the US, with technical support from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mr Gates said better grassroots health data were crucial if progress in childhood health was to be sustained. The rate of childhood mortality was almost halved between 1990 and 2012 but still 6.6m children died before the age of five - mostly from preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, measles, malaria and HIV in the developing world.

Mr Gates, whose foundation is the world's biggest charitable donor to global health causes, has become more vocal about the urgent need for improved disease surveillance since the Ebola outbreak, which has caused almost 11,000 deaths in the past year.

In a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Mr Gates warned of the "significant chance that an epidemic of a substantially more infectious disease [than Ebola] will occur sometime in the next 20 years", citing predictions from the World Bank that a worldwide flu epidemic would reduce global wealth by $3tn.

"Of all the things that could kill more than 10m people around the world, the most likely is an epidemic stemming from either natural causes or bioterrorism," he wrote, calling for countries to co-operate against health threats in a similar way to how western governments safeguard security through Nato.

"Nato countries participate in joint exercises in which they work out logistics such as how fuel and food will be provided, what language they will speak, and what radio frequencies will be used. Few, if any, such measures are in place for response to an epidemic."

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