Web guru targets malaria with social network site

By John Joseph

LONDON (Reuters) - The British entrepreneur who sold a soccer Web site at the age of 17 for $40 million has switched his attention to help launch a social networking site on Sunday designed to fight malaria.

Tom Hadfield set up Soccer.net in his bedroom before selling it to U.S. sports network ESPN, but now hopes the power of sites such as Facebook can curb a disease that kills an estimated one million people a year, many of them in Africa.

"I believe in the power of friends telling friends telling friends," self-styled part-time student and full-time entrepreneur Hadfield told Reuters in an interview.

"Our dream is tens of thousands of people will use social networking tools to build a movement that eradicates malaria."

Now 25 and a fourth-year political science student at Harvard university, Hadfield came up with the idea for www.MalariaEngage.org after a trip to Zambia last summer that gave him a close-up look at the mosquito-born disease.

"Traveling across Africa and seeing the devastation caused by malaria made me realize there was more to life than putting up soccer scores," said Hadfield.

"Everyone I met at an aid project making mosquito nets in Zambia had either lost a child to malaria or knew someone who had."

Hadfield then traveled to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania where he met researchers working on malaria treatments and discovered that their efforts were being held back by a lack of resources.