NEW YORK — Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said Wednesday they will provide $500 million to fight tobacco use around the world, especially in developing countries where smoking rates are rising.
Bloomberg already has given $125 million to the cause and will provide $250 million more. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it will spend $125 million over five years, including a $24 million grant to the Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use that Bloomberg created in 2005.
“I believe a world in which everyone is aware of the destructiveness of tobacco and empowered to avoid it is within reach,” Bloomberg said at the announcement. “We just have to imagine it and then demand it.”
It was the first public event Gates attended since he left Microsoft and turned his attention full time to philanthropy. He also said he was happy to defer to Bloomberg’s leadership in the anti-tobacco campaign.
Bloomberg, who reaped a fortune from the financial-information company he founded, has made limiting public smoking and easy access to smoking-cessation services high priorities.
Gates noted that in China, 67 percent of men and more than half of doctors smoke.
