"When Melinda and I first started our giving, in the late 1990s, our focus was on reproductive health rather than childhood deaths. We felt that giving mothers the tools to limit their family size to what they wanted would have a catalytic effect by reducing population growth and making it easier to feed, educate, and provide jobs for the children who were born.<p>We were surprised when we saw a newspaper article in 1998 showing that only a few diseases cause most childhood deaths and showing how little money was being invested in creating and providing vaccines for these diseases. A chart in the article showed that a particular type of diarrheal disease—rotavirus—was killing over 400,000 children per year. How could a disease we had never heard of get so little attention and kill this many children? We sent the article to my father and asked him to look into how we could help. <i>A surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of deaths actually reduces population growth</i>. Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve this goal without having as many children."<p>2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: Childhood Deaths:
<a href="http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2009/Pages/2009-preventing-childhood-deaths.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/2009/Pages/2009...</a>