Bill Gates just gave away about five per cent of his wealth, some $5.88 billion

THE Microsoft co-founder is famous for giving away his huge fortune and this time his donation equates to 5 per cent of his wealth.

FOR a considerable chunk of his adult life, Bill Gates has laid claim to being the richest man in the world — and he certainly puts it to good use.

The 61-year-old Microsoft co-founder has just made a somewhat mysterious $5.88 billion donation to an as yet to be revealed recipient. That equates to about five per cent of his immense wealth.

Mr Gates and his wife are well known for their charitable foundation and it’s expected the money will make its way to various causes the foundation works on.

The Microsoft co-founder has reduced his stock in the computer software company from 24 per cent in 1996 to just 1.3 per cent today. Nonetheless he is still thought to have one of the biggest fortunes in the world, valued at around $115 billion.

In recent years, the tech mogul and his wife have moved away from their former careers and focused on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which donates to charities, NGO’s and medical initiatives that seek to completely eradicate diseases such as polio, malaria and other epidemics in the third world.

In a 2013 interview Bill Gates said his children would each be left with about $US1 billion each. The rest, about 95 per cent of his wealth, will go to charity within 20 years after he and his wife pass away.

His latest mega donation comes at the same time as news about an exciting new vaccine that could spell the end of polio, which has been produced using a genetically modified “drug factory” plant.

An Afghan health worker gives a vaccination to a child during a polio campaign in the old city of Kabul, Afghanistan. Picture: Rahmat Gul

The leaves of the plant, a close relative of tobacco, contain virus-like particles that mimic the polio pathogen but are incapable of causing a harmful disease.

In animal tests, the viral particle vaccine tricked the immune system into setting up a defence against polio.

Researchers hope it will do the same for humans, without the risks associated with a weakened “live” vaccine that in rare cases triggers symptoms including paralysis.

The research, reported this week in the journal Nature Communications, was funded by the World Health Organisation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Polio was a global scourge until the middle of the last century. Since 1988 the Global Polio Eradication Initiative led by the WHO has reduced incidence of the disease by 99 per cent, but the disease has stubbornly resisted complete elimination.

A few hundred cases of infection still occur each year worldwide, and the numbers are remaining steady with the virus kept at large by use of the live vaccine.

— With AAP