Malnourishment, rather than disease, constitutes the single greatest cause of poor health and untimely death worldwide. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from the chronic lack of adequate food and clean water. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that can end the suffering of malnutrition, largely due to the heterogeneity of its causes and concomitant solutions. Many of the temporary fixes applied through development aid are non-sustainable.

Through distributed collaboration "open source" efforts, we envision future projects that will create local health and nutrition improvements that will in turn diminish disease infection rates. There is no "one size fits all" to improve local agriculture and public health.  Instead, a variety of approaches will be necessary--approaches that facilitate the proactive implementation of specific improvements a the local level--that will in turn lead to longer, healthier and happier lives for people all over the world.

One of the most exciting potential applications of the BiOS Initiative is the democratic, collaborative, and innovative manner in which localized solutions can be found to the localized problem of malnutrition. For example, say a new seed variety has been found that appears to be drought resistant. Improvements may be necessary in the areas of seed propagation and dissemination, as well as prescriptives for planting, fertilizing, and harvesting, marketing, and many others before the seed can be impactful on a large scale. This process of improving the original innovation would be extremely expensive for a large multinational corporation and nigh impossible for a government research group in an LDC, but it will be more than feasible within an eventual BioForge project community. 

Excerpt from address to Global Forum on Health Research, 2004:

"The most effectual alteration of resource flows to improve health worldwide thus has little to do with new coordination from OECD countries outward for drug production, nor creation of any single new food resource that can be delivered to the developing world. Given the heterogeneous nature of this global problem, the best solution is to empower the inventive and committed minds within the developing world to address the root causes locally."

Connett and Jefferson, "Fostering Democratic Innovation as a Means of Reducing the 10/90 Gap in Health".

Read the accompanying presentation (as a pdf) from the conference.

Links to other collaborative health projects:

• Program for Appropriate Technology in Health
• Malaria Vaccine Initiative
• The Tropical Disease Initiative
• The Institute for OneWorld Health
• Drugs for Neglected Diseases

**Source of Statistics: State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.