'There's no reason only poor people should have the experience'
Bill Gates once released a swarm of mosquitoes on an audience he was speaking to about the dangers of malaria.
At a
TED conference in 2009, the Microsoft co-founder thought of an innovative way to get his point across to the audience.
Gates was making the point that, even if an issue like malaria doesn’t directly the Western world, we should still care. He pointed out that, at the time, more money had been invested into researching hair loss drugs because this is an issue which affects “rich men.”
Malaria on the other hand is most prevalent in poor areas of the world where it can be devastating.
So, he thought of a vivid way to illustrate his point.
Gates picked up a glass from the table in front of him, letting the mosquitoes loose on the audience, telling the crowd that "there's no reason only poor people should have the experience" of swatting away the potentially deadly insects.
He did reassure the audience that the mosquitoes were not infected.
At the time, he was trying to warn the audience that a mosquito-borne pandemic poses a greater threat to humankind than global war.
Gates has long warned -
and continues to warn - about the threat a truly global pandemic poses to humanity.
Mosquitoes kill around 830,000 people a year - more than any other animal on the planet. More than half of these deaths are from malaria.
Since 2009, his and his wife's foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has done a huge amount of work in fighting the disease.
In a
2016 blog post, Gates highlighted that the malaria death rate in sub-Saharan Africa has declined by a "stunning 57 percent since 2000.”
He labelled the fact that the death rate had more than halved as a "miracle" and "one of the greatest success stories in the history of global health."
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