Carter Center to Receive Gates Global Health Award

Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that the Carter Center will receive the 2006 Gates Award for Global Health, which carries with it a $1 million prize. A press release notes some of the Carter Center’s laudable achievements:

• Reducing Guinea worm disease by 99.5%
• Delivering more than 75 million treatments for river blindness
• Establishing more than 4,000 community-based programs for trachoma, the largest preventable cause of blindness

As a former Carter Center staff member, I can attest to the Gates Foundation’s critical role in advancing the Guinea worm and river blindness campaigns. The Carter Center’s team of global health experts has created several highly effective infectious disease programs, but the Gates Foundation is providing critical financial backing, typically in the form of matching grants, to see these campaigns through to the finish. In partnerships like this, we see the emergence of new ideas and new standards in global health - bravo to both organizations (it’s a shared prize in my view).