Digital News Report

Bill Gates

Digital News Report- Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes into a crowd at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference on Wednesday in Long Beach, California to bring attention to malaria.  Gates, the founder of the Microsoft software company, stated “Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

He later assured the crowd that the mosquitoes were not infected with the disease, but said, “there is more money put into baldness drugs than into malaria.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated almost $168.7 million to the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative in September 2008 to help fund research to develop a malaria vaccine.  Gates retired as the head of Microsoft last year to focus on his foundation.

Dave Morin, the manager of Facebook, was the first to report the incident.  He updated his twitter account to say, “Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said ‘Not only poor people should experience this’.”  The official TED twitter account read, “No they were not malarial. An amazing TED moment.”

TED curator Chris Anderson reportedly joked that the video of the event will be posted at TED.com with the title “Gates releases more bugs into the world.”