The modern malaria fight was sparked not just by health experts, but by entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, who has invested billions of dollars to develop new tools and strategies to eliminate the disease. In this episode, we’re joined by Philip Welkhoff, who has led the Gates Foundation’s Malaria Program since 2018, to delve into the cutting-edge technologies that are moving from the lab to the field and could finally make malaria eradication a reality.

In this episode of The Best Worst Thing, we’ll discuss how global efforts to end malaria can get derailed by a range of challenges: financial, political and epidemiological. 

To tell that story, we’ll be speaking with a true living legend: the first woman elected to lead an African nation, former President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who found herself dealing with multiple health crises when Liberia experienced an Ebola outbreak in 2014. 

In this episode, we’ll explore how insecticide-treated bed nets helped cut malaria deaths in half in just a few years, uncovering the insight, inspiration, and challenges from the people who helped make it possible. We’ll hear from President Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania’s Head of State from 2005 to 2015 during the critical period of scale up of mosquito nets, and Ray Chambers, an international financier turned UN Special Envoy for Malaria and co-founder of Malaria No More.

In the past 20 years, simple innovations for malaria and other diseases, like bed nets, vaccines, rapid tests, and treatments have saved over 100 million lives. In our first episode, we hear from two pioneers at the heart of this global health revolution: John Bridgeland ("Bridge"), former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Bush, and Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer, the first U.S. Global Malaria Coordinator. 

Together, they share how a unique convergence of global crises, political leadership, and ambitious vision laid the groundwork for the modern malaria campaign, driving the largest expansion of global health programming in history.