SEATTLE, 21 May: When the Gates family back in the mid-1990s discovered PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, it was a relatively small and little-known non-profit working on the health and disease problems of poor countries.
Today, thanks largely to funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the list of ongoing work by the Seattle organization on the US west coast has ballooned in scope and breadth.
Thirty years after its founding, PATH now coordinates many of the Seattle philanthropys largest endeavors in global health, such as the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (which has received 250 million US dollar from the Gates Foundation).
PATH now has more than 600 employees worldwide and an annual budget of nearly 170 million dollar.
It is one of the worlds largest and, arguably, most influential private, non-profit organizations in the global health arena.
– None of us would have imagined that it could ever get this big, said Gordon Duncan, a reproductive health expert who with Gordon Perkin helped launch PATH in 1977.
Perkin, a former president and founder of PATH, said that in the 1990s, “being known in Seattle was not much of a concern, since our focus was on reaching out to the developing world.”
PATH, which was created by Perkin, Duncan and Rich Mahoney to focus on family planning, had by the 1990s moved on to technologically oriented solutions to problems in maternal and child health, immunizations and disease in poor countries, such as:
– A single-use syringe (engangs-injektionssprøjte) (auto-disabled to prevent reuse, which can spread disease) now distributed by UNICEF worldwide at the rate of more than 5 million a month.
– A heat-sensitive label for a vaccine vial (lille medicinflaske) that changes color if it has been rendered ineffective during transport. The World Health Organization recently said that use of these labels in the developing world has saved billions of dollars and countless lives.
– An inexpensive diagnostic blood test called the “HIV dipstick” that costs only a few cents and can be used in resource-poor communities.
– Things have really changed, said PATH President Chris Elias, adding: – People now look at these global health problems and think they are solvable.
– Everywhere I go these days, people ask me about PATH, said founder Mahoney, who works for the International Vaccine Institute, based in Seoul, South Korea, on a Gates-funded project to develop a dengue (dengue feber – tropesygdom) vaccine for children.
PATH works by first targeting a health problem, evaluating possible solutions and assessing if they can play a useful role in finding the best solution, said Jacquelline Sherris, who oversees global strategy for the organization.
– We have physicians, engineers, anthropologists, business managers, policymakers, communications or behavioral experts and even people in theater work on problems, Sherris said.
– It is not so much a technological approach as it is a systems approach to solving problems, she said.
Michael Free, vice president for technologies and one of the original PATH employees, said the organization was one of the first to emphasize the “public-private partnership” approach to solving problems.
It often acted as a liaison between two entities that seldom trusted each other — industry and public-sector agencies such as UNICEF or the WHO.
Kilde: The Push Journal
