Greetings from Africa. I am participating in the 2019 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting at the United Nations Conference Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Grand Challenges is a family of global initiatives supported by various funders around the world to address critical problems of health and development. Here, I took part in a panel discussion on October 28 during the meeting’s opening plenary session. The panel included (from left to right) Haitham El-noush, senior adviser, Innovation in Health and Development, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Oslo; Matshidiso Moeti, director, World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa, Brazzaville, Congo; Felix Dakora, president, African Academy of Sciences (AAS), Nairobi, Kenya; Francis Collins; Jennifer Blanke, vice president, Agriculture, Human and Social Development, African Development Bank Group, Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and Tom Kariuki, AAS’s director of programs. Among the topics raised during this stimulating conversation were the need for cooperation among the world’s scientific and political leaders and current efforts to prioritize African initiatives that will most immediately benefit human health. Credit: AAS
The NIH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, will invest at least $200 million over the next four years to develop affordable gene-based cures globally for sickle cell disease and HIV infection. The announcement of this timely collaboration was made during a late-morning telebriefing at NIH on October 23, 2019. Here, I met with two of my fellow participants on the call: Gary Gibbons (left), director of NIH’s Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and Trevor Mundel, (middle), president of the Gates Foundation’s global health efforts. Also joining the telebriefing remotely by phone were Tony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Matishidiso Moeti, director of the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa. Credit: NIH
