Malaria - Still a Ravanging disease Bill Gates will semi-retire from Microsoft in 2008 to focus his energy on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the preventable infectious diseases the Gates Foundation hopes to eradicate is malaria. But major obstacles remain: some antimalarial drugs have become obsolete in fighting certain strains of Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, and mosquitoes that spread Plasmodium are growing resistant to current insecticides. Malaria continues to be a killer in parts of Africa, Asia, and South America; it will claim about one million lives this year, many of them children.