This week the fight against infectious diseases got a big boost from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The organization announced that it is creating the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network, or CHAMPS for short. CHAMPS will be a network of disease surveillance centers in developing nations that will “gather better data, faster, about how, where and why children are getting sick and dying,” according to the release.
The Gates Foundation will give up to $75 million in initial funding for the centers, which will be based in areas with high mortality rates among children, especially in Sub-Saharan African and South Asia. It’s a long-term project — at least a 20-year commitment — that will not only help medical professionals mobilize in an outbreak and treat patients, but also study how diseases spread to develop better vaccines, treatments and health tools.
The Gates Foundation will partner in the network of CHAMPS centers with the Emory Global Health Institute (home to the International Association of National Public Health Institutes) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Initially, the project will include six sites, “but eventually could be expanded to as many as 20 sites,” according the Emory release.
Emory’s VP for global health Jeffrey Koplan said in the statement that 7 million children die every year from preventable diseases, like pneumonia, malaria and tuberculosis, around the world. “This surveillance network will help the Gates Foundation and other stakeholders to quickly generate the data needed to develop targeted prevention, diagnosis and treatment for children in developing countries,” he continued.
The recent Ebola outbreak, which Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is also fighting, is a perfect example of how such established medical centers on the ground can help fight disease.
“The world needs better, more timely public health data not only to prepare for the next epidemic, but to save children’s lives now,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in the statement. “Over the past 15 years, deaths of children in developing countries have been dramatically reduced, but to continue that trend for the next 15 years, we need more definitive data about where and why children are dying. This will also better position us to respond to other diseases that may turn into an epidemic.”
