Don't hide your money

Prudence to help selflessness
Charity will be even more useful in planning and reporting.
Georgy Pulyaevsky, "Expert Online"

In 2000, when doctor Julie Jacobson visited hospitals in India, hospital wards were overflowing with hospitalized children. The culprit of the full house was Japanese encephalitis. The virus, carried by mosquitoes, causes paralysis, convulsions and death. This jungle storm has killed more than 3 million people worldwide over the past 60 years. Japanese encephalitis is one of the most severe transmissible neuroinfections.

Despite the long-standing existence of this disease, the first publications devoted to the clinical picture of the disease appeared in 1924, during the epidemic that swept 7,000 people and became a national disaster for Japan. About 80% of the cases died. Soon, this form of neuroinfection was given the generally accepted name – Japanese encephalitis (encephalitis japonica).

Later it turned out that Japanese encephalitis is a natural focal viral disease that occurs not only in Japan, but also in other countries of the Pacific region, including in the Russian Primorye.

"I couldn't believe my own eyes," says Jacobson. – Children in a coma, children in convulsions, two or three people in a bed."

Today, Jacobson oversees projects that prevent epidemics of such tropical diseases at the Bill and Millinda Gates Foundation, which in 2003 subsidized more than $35 million as part of the WAY program aimed at combating the virus. In third world countries, the price of vaccination for many patients remains out of reach. Bill Gates' company found a small Chinese company that managed to create a vaccine cheaper. This year, about 60 million children were vaccinated in India alone, and another 3 million were immunized in other affected countries.

It would seem that what could be wrong with the work of such organizations?

But, despite the hard work of the foundation, its efforts cause a lot of criticism. Last May, researchers at the University of London reported that the goals of the project are based on a "purely personal view of the problem", and not on expert assessments. And in 2007, a number of articles in the Los Angeles Times accused the foundation that they were too focused on the problems of AIDS and malaria, forgetting about the main scourge of third world countries - hunger. The apotheosis of criticism can be considered a review compiled last summer by Jeff Rakes, president of the foundation. The review showed that many of those who fell under the fund's program were afraid of being beholden to the organization and therefore tried to avoid the fund's help.

The critical remarks suggest a question that world experts have been trying to answer for many years: can charitable organizations act more effectively, bypassing the bureaucratic slingshots of state institutions, or will their amateur efforts always be short-sighted, fixing only today's problems and not considering real world threats?

An example when the sphere of application of efforts has been successfully selected "offhand" and positive results have been obtained is the Elizabeth Geyser Foundation for HIV–Infected Children. This organization received about $ 15 million from the pocket of the creator of Microsoft for the prevention and possible prevention of HIV transmission from infected mothers to their children. About 25% of children whose mothers refused the intervention of the foundation were born HIV-infected. However, among those who used preventive treatment, the risk of transmission of the disease fell to 3%. Thanks to such results, the project founded about 2,500 prevention centers in 14 countries of the world last June (by the way, including our country).

But there are also reverse examples, when a long and painstaking data collection is required for full-fledged assistance to victims.

For example, until recently, there was no funding in Nigeria for comprehensive diagnosis or treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis, given that up to a thousand new variations on the topic of this disease appear there every year.

Over the past three years, the International Association of National Institutes of Health has received approximately 160 thousand dollars from the Gates Family Foundation for the development of new diagnostic systems and attempts to provide tuberculosis treatment in Nigeria. With the funds received from the foundation, Oni Aideb, a scientist from the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, upgraded his laboratory, reducing the duration of analysis processing from a month to several days, and began the first national review of the disease in the country.

"Despite the fact that Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, the world community did not have any accurate data on the prevalence of tuberculosis," says James Hughes, senior advisor to the Association for Infectious Diseases from Emory University. "And constant analysis is necessary to understand which drugs to import and where to distribute them."

Thanks to the data collected by Aideb, Nigeria was the first to receive new drugs for the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis. And, it seems to me, this would not be possible without careful selection of data.

It turns out that charitable foundations, like other investors, need to understand that their final financing was created to reduce time costs, but without proper reporting, it is impossible to be sure that the assistance was provided and was provided where it is needed.

It remains only to solve the question: how to create a system that works smoothly according to such a scheme? I want to believe that the person who created the Microsoft empire will be able to answer such a question.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru13.04.2011