TheStar.com - A significant week for philanthropy

TheStar.com - A significant week for philanthropy: "A significant week for philanthropy


Researchers at Cardiff University have concluded that Monday of this week was the most depressing day of the year. Yet this Monday might � just possibly might � prove to have been a turning point in the fortunes of the most deprived of the world's continents.
Monday was when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $75 million (all figures U.S.) a year for 10 years to the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation (GAVI) which Gates helped to set up in 2000. It was an act of philanthropy of the highest � and most cost-effective � kind which will save hundreds of thousands of young lives in the developing world.
In 2002, around 10.5 million children under 5 died, of whom 1.4 million perished from diseases that could have been prevented by vaccines. The timing is coincidental, but the Gates initiative is a reminder that even the death toll after the tsunami, horrific though it was, is on a lesser scale than this most preventable of scourges. "