Washington, DC — Saying that it "doesnt take a scientist to know that our health, like our freedom, is ultimately indivisible," Melinda French Gates awarded the first annual Gates Award for Global Health to the Centre for Health and Population Research of Bangladesh.
The award, presented at the Global Health Councils awards dinner in Washington DC on May 31, gave the Centre a million US dollars a sum that Bangladeshi Prime Minister Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim said her government would match to acknowledge and support work "that has made a major and lasting contribution to global health." In addition to its research on vaccine trials and clinical practice, the Centre pioneered the Oral Rehydration Therapy method that is saving over a million lives a year, mostly in poor countries.
The Centre has also sent rapid response teams to health crisis situations, such as cholera and Shigella epidemics in Congo and Peru. African health facilities now widely use oral hydration salts developed at the Centre to treat babies dying of diarrheal diseases.
Africa took center stage for much of the evening, as speakers and awardees noted the continents urgent need for health services. The Global Health Councils annual conference, which ended this weekend, focused on the challenges of improving the health of women. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a keynote address at the awards dinner, called attention to the fact that in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS infection rates are far higher among young women than among men.
"Study after study has shown," he said, "that there is no effective development strategy in which women do not play a central part." And when women suffer ill health, he said, all of society pays the price.
ABCs "Nightline" won the "Excellence in Media Award" for a series on AIDS in Africa. The series focused on the impact of the disease in Zimbabwe, one of Africas hardest hit nations.
Graca Machel, Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and the former first lady of both Mozambique and South Africa, co-hosted the Councils four-day conference and was an often-invoked presence at the dinner. The UN chief hailed her as a model and an inspiration in the fight for the rights of women and children.
Another African woman, Sydia Nduna, received the "Best Practices in Global Health Award" for her work with the International Rescue Committee in establishing a Sexual and Gender Based Violence project in Tanzania. In her acceptance speech, she talked of women in refugee camps who have been brutalized by sexual violence. They experience, she said, "a pain too deep for tears," a pain that extends beyond the body and beyond the mind to sear the soul.
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In the soaring space of the National Building Museum where the dinner was held, speakers sought to turn the plight of people without adequate health care into a challenge that is impossible for the more fortunate to ignore. "Its time," said Melinda Gates, who co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, the founder of MicroSoft,"that we insist that freedom from easily preventable disease becomes a basic human right."
