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The numbers are staggering, the loss of life almost unfathomable. Of the 40 million people worldwide who have HIV or AIDS, 28 million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Because the most effective treatments are often expensive and unavailable, a disproportionate number of Africans are among the 3 million people killed by HIV/AIDS every year.

Malaria threatens as much as one-third of the globe's population -- more than 2 billion people -- and infects up to a half-billion individuals every year. Of the 2.7 million people who die from the infectious disease each year, approximately three-quarters are young African children.

Another 2 million people, nearly all of them inhabitants of the Third World, die each year from diarrheal diseases. In the United States and other developed countries, such illnesses are often easily preventable and rarely fatal. But not for the men, women, and children in the poorest of the poor countries. It's as if they exist in another time, when water and mosquitoes still pose grave danger and human beings are a far more vulnerable species.

This is the grim state of global health today. Yet Dr. Richard Klausner, who is tackling these and other medical crises in the developing world, is anything but disheartened. In fact, he's unfailingly optimistic. He talks of bridling epidemics through innovative forms of intervention and accelerating the development of vaccines for HIV and malaria. He talks of creating sustainable health care and providing nutrient-fortified food. He talks of hope.

"There's every reason to be incredibly optimistic that we have the capability to solve these problems," Klausner says. "That's what the past hundred years have shown -- that we can actually solve problems like this."

Coming from practically anyone else, such talk might be dismissed as wishful, if not delusional, thinking. But then again, Klausner is not your typical global-health advocate. He's undertaking these problems with a powerful, enviable, and unique resource: Bill Gates's bank account. So Klausner has plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Billions, in fact.

In May, Klausner joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its global-health executive director. With about $24 billion in total assets, it is reportedly the largest foundation in history, and its main focus, in addition to improving education, is improving global health in the places where conditions are the worst.

Of the nearly $5.5 billion in grant commitments that have been made so far, the largest chunk of resources -- more than $2.8 billion -- targets health problems. The grants make existing prevention methods and treatment more accessible in places such as Africa and India and fund research and development of vaccines in the hope of eradicating diseases that disproportionately affect people in Third World countries.

In a speech delivered to the United Nations in May, Bill Gates explained that once he discovered the stunning health inequities between the richest and poorest nations, he was motivated to do something now rather than later in life.

"Of the $70 billion spent globally on health every year," Gates said, "only 10% is devoted to research on diseases that make up 90% of the total disease burden."