Malaria is a disease affecting over half a billion people every year, commonly associated with poverty. As a result of that, many people fail to realize how serious this is, which is perhaps why Bill Gates, the Microsoft boss turned into full-time philanthropist, decided to give the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) audience a taste of it by releasing mosquitoes into the room.

 

Gates was delivering a presentation on malaria, and motivated his gesture through a very simple explanation: poor people shouldn’t be the only ones to experience this, as reported by Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin on Twitter.

 

The most common form of contacting malaria is through mosquito bites. Upon biting an infected person, the mosquito becomes carrier of the malaria parasites, which are then transmitted through saliva upon biting another person.

 

The blood-carried parasites multiply fast, causing recurrent fever, nausea, chills. There is no known vaccine, which is why the disease still proves fatal in many of the cases, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most victims are children under 5 (over 2,000 children in Africa die every day from the disease).

 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are great supporters of finding effective treatments for malaria, and ultimately eradicating the disease by 2015. The Foundation is currently working with partners around the world to help discover and develop malaria vaccines, in addition to working on developing effective prevention strategies.