WOW.    I know 3 things about Bill Gates.  First, he's the man behind Microsoft.  Second, he/his company makes enough money every year to rival many developing nations.  Thirdly, if you read the web, he is not very well-liked. 

However, $3.2 billion is $3.2 billion dollars.  Ok, it's probably tax deuctable and loose change to him but it will serve a purpose.  A good one too.

Gates Aims Billions at Illnesses of World's Neediest. Since its founding less than four years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $3.2 billion to improving health in the developing world. By Stephanie Strom. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] (needs registration)

By STEPHANIE STROM

"Philanthropists do not typically lavish their money on swine. Or mosquitoes, for that matter.

But Bill Gates is no ordinary philanthropist. If immunizing pigs can end the spread of tapeworms, which cause virulent neurological disorders, he will pay to vaccinate them. If mosquitoes can be neutralized as malaria carriers by altering their genetic code, his money — and lots of it — will support the research.

"The basic science that can be applied to these problems has been advanced greatly," Mr. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, said in a recent interview at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "So all you have to do is take a modest amount of the rich world's resources to have a huge impact on the poor world."

"Modest" is a relative term, particularly when the person using it is the world's richest man and is speaking of his plans to solve intractable health problems on a global scale.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has distributed $6.2 billion since its founding less than four years ago, has pledged more than half of that total, or $3.2 billion, to improving health in the developing world. The foundation's influence now rivals that of the World Health Organization and Unicef.

Here is one point of comparison: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a partnership of 14 countries with private charities, foundations and industry, plans to spend roughly $1.5 billion to fight those diseases over the next two to three years, some $50 million or $60 million of which comes from the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation on its own has already spent more than $610 million on those diseases, and will spend at least another $478 million by the end of 2005. ..."

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