The Johns Hopkins Gazette: July 31, 2000
July 31, 2000
VOL. 29, NO. 42

  

Gates Gives $20 Million to SPH

By Dennis O'Shea
Homewood
Johns Hopkins Gazette Online Edition

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health $20 million to find the precise combination of vitamins and other micronutrients that will most effectively save lives and prevent illness among impoverished mothers and children in the developing world.

The grant--the foundation's third to the School of Public Health in just over three years--will be used to strengthen and expand time-critical research already planned or under way in Nepal, Bangladesh, Ghana, Zanzibar and India.

"The results of these studies are likely to prove crucial to the well-being and survival of millions of women and children a year," said William R. Brody, president of Hopkins. "The university is grateful to Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation for making it possible for us to do this research thoroughly and quickly, so that it will have the broadest possible impact."

The projects currently are funded in part by such agencies as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health. The new grant will enable researchers to gather and analyze far more data. The additional information is urgently needed but unaffordable without the foundation's help, said Alfred Sommer, dean of the School of Public Health and principal investigator in the research.

In the developing world, an estimated one in four children dies before reaching age 5. Worldwide, some 11 million children and 7 million adults die each year from diseases associated with poverty.

"Reducing mortality rates for women and children in developing countries is a global health priority for the foundation," said Gordon Perkin, executive director of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "The work being done by Johns Hopkins on micronutrients shows the potential for dramatic health improvements at relatively little cost."

The research funded by the Gates grant is the direct descendant of Sommer's finding in the early 1980s that small doses of vitamin A, costing only pennies and intended to prevent blindness among children in developing nations, also protected them from a range of killer infections and cut their mortality rate by as much as 50 percent.

Despite initial skepticism from some colleagues, Sommer replicated and expanded his research, proving that lack of vitamin A was a threat not only to children's sight but to their lives. Within a decade, the international public health community, including the World Health Organization and UNICEF, had launched major efforts to eliminate vitamin A deficiency in the developing world.

Today, the question for researchers is what other micronutrients--chemicals such as zinc, folate, iron or B-complex, needed by the human body in trace amounts--should be used in combination with vitamin A to achieve the maximum protective effect. The research today focuses not only on children but also on expectant mothers, who have been shown to die from complications of childbirth in much smaller numbers with prenatal supplements of vitamin A or its precursor, beta-carotene.

The Johns Hopkins team's fear is that--without adequate research now to find the precise best "mix" of micronutrients--the world community will rush to adopt a standard "package" of nutritional supplements that does not provide the best possible improvement on the benefits of vitamin A given alone; worse, an improperly mixed formula might even reduce or even eliminate the benefit of vitamin A.

"We have a limited time to answer questions that much of the scientific community does not even recognize we lack answers to," Sommer said. "That's why this research must be accomplished now. If we wait, we run the risk that nutritional programs will be put in place based on what we think we know, rather than on real science."

The Gates Foundation's first grant to Johns Hopkins, $2.25 million announced in May 1997, established in the School of Public Health a training and research program for family planning and reproductive health specialists from developing nations. The second, a $20 million grant announced in May 1999, built on the first by establishing the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. The institute brings scholars from Latin America, Asia and Africa to Hopkins to earn advanced degrees; provides these scholars with other training in Baltimore and in their home countries; and provides other support for family planning and reproductive health specialists from developing nations.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to improving people's lives by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community. Led by Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates Sr., and Patty Stonesifer, the Seattle-based foundation has an asset base of $21.8 billion. Its central priorities are preventing deadly diseases among poor children by expanding access to vaccines, and developing vaccines against malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Other major efforts include extending unprecedented opportunities for learning by bringing computers with Internet access to every eligible library in the United States and Canada, and, through the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, providing scholarships to academically talented minority students with severe financial need in the United States.

Related Web Sites

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Alfred Sommer

Johns Hopkins Family Health and Child Survival

'Dietary vitamin A supplements improve maternal survival in South Asia' (1999 news release)

'Vitamin A cuts children's malaria risk by nearly a third' (1999 news release)

Child Health Research Project

Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health

Gates Millennium Scholars Program
 


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