Bill Gates gave almost $1.5 billion last year to fight global health threats, including AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

Bill Gates gave almost $1.5 billion last year to fight global health threats, including AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Now, he'd like to see more commitment from the world's industrialized nations. The grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation equal more than a quarter of the $5 billion industrialized nations spent combined. Clearly, Gates said, the wealthy nations haven't been doing enough. "The world hasn't been allocating its resources properly at all in global health," the Microsoft founder said in an interview in Sunday's editions of The Boston Globe from his office in Redmond, Wash. The foundation made 60 separate grants in the last year -- totaling $1.44 billion -- and Gates said it will give at least $1 billion annually "throughout my lifetime and beyond." When Gates and his wife established the foundation in 1997, he assumed the world was spending wisely on global health issues, but he learned differently, he said. Since then, Gates said, he's become a "cultist" on world health issues, soaking up information wherever he can get it. His motivations are sure to be questioned by some, considering Microsoft's ongoing antitrust battle with the federal government. Regardless of why he's spending the money, though, Gates seems committed to the cause. "I think the greatest inequality is the fact that five billion people on earth don't have access to the medicines that a billion people have," he said. "I'm sure for my whole lifetime, even beyond, that world health is going to be our top priority."