World Malaria Day - April 25 - Melissa Hatfield

World Malaria Day is this Friday, April 25th.

Malaria is a killer. In Africa, it is the number one killer of children. But it doesn’t have to be. Malaria is both a preventable and treatable disease. It can be prevented by giving families and individuals insecticide-treated bed nets to sleep under and taking steps to kill mosquitoes where they breed and when they enter houses to feed at night. At the same time, anti-malarial drugs such as artemisinin and other combination therapies that are widely available can treat malaria before it becomes deadly.

Life-Saving Facts

For just $10 we can buy a bed net, distribute it to a family, and explain its use.
Insecticide-treated bed nets can keep a family safe for up to four years.
Nothing But Nets has partnered with the Measles Initiative to deliver the nets to even the most hard-to-reach areas of Africa.

I have a team called "BuzzKillers" and we are putting malaria on notice! If you’d like to give any amount of money – whether $10 or more – go to www.NothingbutNets.net and do a search for my team, BuzzKillers. Then, just follow the instructions to make your online donation. We already have $270 – that’s 27 nets out there saving lives.

Make a difference. Save a life.

4 Comments

Dave Donelson

April 25, 2008 at 6:11 am Reply

Great strides have been made in many places in the fight against malaria, a disease that kills a million people, most of them children, every year. That’s what World Malaria Day is all about. It draws attention to the many successful ways the war against malaria is being waged, mainly through the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and other relatively low-tech preventive measures. Unfortunately, children in the Democratic Republic of Congo remain highly vulnerable.
According to the World Health Organization, less than 1% of DRC children under five years of age sleep under protective nets. This results in most of them suffering six to ten malaria-related fever incidents per year. The disease also accounts for 45% of childhood mortality, which overall runs to 20%. In short, malaria kills nearly one in ten children in the Congo every year.
In Heart of Diamonds, my novel of the Congo, I explore how continuous armed conflict in the country is responsible for many of these deaths. Medical supplies can’t be distributed when roads, railroads, and airstrips have been destroyed. Treatment can’t be delivered by medical personnel who have been chased from their clinics and hospitals. People driven from their homes, plagued by malnutrition, inadequate shelter, and lack of sanitary facilities are weak and less capable of warding off disease. War creates a breeding ground for death by malaria just as surely as swamps full of stagnant water breed anopheles mosquitoes.
Although the intensity of conflict has decreased since the truce of 2003 and democratic elections of 2006, millions of displaced persons still struggle to survive and hot spots remain in the eastern and western provinces. Collapsed infrastructure has severely weakened the health system in the DRC, and the strengthening process is a slow one.
The DRC, unfortunately, has little to celebrate this World Malaria Day.

BA

April 24, 2008 at 10:44 am Reply

play a game to send a net for free to struggle malaria:
http://www.nothingbutnets.net/its-easy-to-help/wmd
P.S: Note that Funds will be released for nets through April 25th while funds last, up to $200,000