Never Be Silent

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In its entirety:

HANOI, Vietnam – Diarrhea doesn’t make headlines. Nor does pneumonia. AIDS and malaria tend to get most of the attention.

Yet even though cheap tools could prevent and cure both diseases, they kill an estimated 3.5 million kids under 5 each a year globally — more than HIV and malaria combined.

“They have been neglected, because donor or partnership mechanisms shifted their emphasis to HIV and AIDS and other issues,” said Dr. Tesfaye Shiferaw, a UNICEF official in Africa. “These age-old traditional killers remain with us. The ones dying are the children of the poor.”

Global spending on maternal, newborn and child health was about $3.5 billion in 2006, according to a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That same year, nearly $9 billion was devoted to HIV and AIDS, according to UNAIDS.

Pneumonia is the biggest killer of children under 5, claiming more then 2 million lives annually or about 20 percent of all child deaths. AIDS, in contrast, accounts for about 2 percent.

If identified early, pneumonia can be treated with inexpensive antibiotics. Yet UNICEF and the World Health Organization estimate less than 20 percent of those sickened receive the drugs.

A vaccine has been available since 2000 but has not yet reached many children in developing countries. The GAVI Alliance, a global partnership, hopes to introduce it to 42 countries by 2015.

Diarrheal diseases, such as cholera and rotavirus, kill 1.5 million kids each year, most under 2 years old. The children die from dehydration, weakened immune systems and malnutrition. Often they get sick from drinking dirty water.

The worst cholera outbreak to hit Africa in 15 years killed more than 4,000 people in Zimbabwe last year. The country recently reported new cases of the waterborne disease, and more are expected as the rainy season peaks and sewers overflow.

Rotavirus, a highly contagious disease spread through contaminated hands and surfaces, is the top cause of severe diarrhea, accounting for more than a half million child deaths a year.

A vaccine routinely given to children in the U.S. and Europe is expected to reach 44 poorer countries by 2015 through the GAVI Alliance.

“Every child in the United States gets it, even though they have access to clean water and hygiene,” said John Wecker, of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based nonprofit that is part of the vaccine alliance. “The only effective way to prevent these deaths is through vaccination.”

Diarrheal diseases received more attention in the 1980s and 1990s, he said, but interest has waned or been diverted elsewhere, allowing them to creep back.

“How did the leading killers end up at the bottom of the global health agenda? I don’t know,” Wecker said at a recent GAVI meeting in Hanoi. “We’ve got the tools. We’re not looking for the next technological breakthrough. It’s here now and it’s not being used.”

Death can often be prevented by giving children fluid replacement, a simple recipe of salt and sugar mixed with clean water to help ward off dehydration. Yet 60 percent of children with diarrhea never receive the concoction, according to a WHO and UNICEF report released last month.

“It is so preventable,” said Dr. Richard Cash, a Harvard University expert who helped develop the oral rehydration therapy 40 years ago. “Preventing the deaths is at the very least what we should be striving for.”

From CARE, follow the link to send President Obama a quick message.

It is critical that the United States take action to mitigate the effects of climate change now, and ensure that vulnerable populations have access to resources that can help them adapt to changing conditions.

Please contact President Obama today. Urge him to go to Copenhagen and show that the United States is — and will continue to be — a global leader in the fight against climate change!

From the World Food Programme, in its entirety:

ROME — With more than one billion hungry for the first time in history, women already play a key role in producing food and feeding their families. With tools and training they could become an unstoppable force, she said. Read speech

“People often ask, what can be done to defeat hunger?” said Sheeran, speaking to a First Ladies’ Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. “My answer is simple: empower women, because women are the secret weapon to fight hunger.”Research has shown that women produce more than 50 percent of all food grown worldwide and in some regions, such as Africa, they are doing up to 80 percent of all agricultural work.

Little access to land

But in spite of shouldering the burden of producing food for their families and communities, women farmers only have access to five percent of agricultural services in the world. Land ownership and access to credit is particularly low.

The First Ladies Summit panel on Food Security and Women’s Access to Resources was chaired by Her Excellency Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, First Lady of the Arab Republic of Egypt and attended by WFP’s Ambassador Against Hunger, John Kufuor, former President of the Republic of Ghana.

Panellists shared experiences from their own countries on best practices and success stories. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for example, WFP has partnered ten women’s centres and four local bakeries to prepare healthy pastries – date bars and high-energy biscuits – for use in school meals programmes. More than 130 women are employed through the programme, using milk from local dairies.

Billion for a billion

And In Egypt, women grow pesticide-free vegetables on the flat roofs of their houses to boost their family’s nutrition and increase their income.

Sheeran called on the 700 million women who do have enough food to contribute €1 a week to the 700 million women who are hungry, as part of WFP’s “Billion for a Billion” citizens’ action campaign.

WFP’s Executive Director highlighted the importance of nutrition for pregnant women and for infants in the first two years of life. And she underlined the importance of every country making food security a national priority, bringing women and girls into strategic plans.

I get to share good news! From CNN, an editorial about the initiatives undertaken on the island of Zanzibar to eradicate malaria. Excerpt:

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania — I recently accompanied Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO, and Ray Chambers, U.N. Special Envoy for Malaria, on a trip to Africa to see firsthand the region’s fight against malaria.

The single most memorable image of the trip was from a pediatric hospital ward on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar: a dozen beds and not a single patient in them. Imagine that.

I have searing memories of visiting wards much like this elsewhere in the world where there were as many as three children to a bed and more sleeping on the floor, deathly ill with malaria.

Where have all the patients gone? After all, malaria is a big killer in much of the developing world. It is probably the most prevalent disease that mankind has ever suffered.

Each year, there are over 250 million cases and almost one million deaths — most of them young children, and the vast majority in Africa.

But in many countries, malaria is also a success story. Since 2000, the number of reported malaria cases, deaths, or both has declined by at least half in 25 countries. Zanzibar — a relatively small but striking example — has virtually eliminated the disease over the past five years. These successes show what a combination of political will, technical resources, and financial commitment can do when applied to a strategy that works.

From the ONE Campaign blog, in its entirety:

I just came across the story of Captain Benjamin A. Sklaver, a 32-year-old Army reservist who was killed while serving in Afghanistan. Benjamin Sklaver was also the founder of a nonprofit called the ClearWater Initiative based out of New Haven, Connecticut.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Captain Sklaver’s family, and I wanted to be sure to make all of our readers aware of the ClearWater Initiative. According to remarks posted on the organization’s website:

A 1999 graduate of Tufts University, [Benjamin Sklaver] went on to obtain a graduate degree in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School, also at Tufts. He took a particular interest in assisting refugees and the poor in Africa. During his studies at the Fletcher School, he volunteered for the Army Reserve and following completion of his degree, he served with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta in that agency’s International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch.

While on active duty with the army in Africa, Ben spent considerable time in northern Uganda, where he was shocked to learn of the chronic health concerns affecting children, pregnant women, and others in the region’s small villages stemming from the lack of clean water. During his deployment in Uganda, he worked to improve access to safe water and upon his return to the U.S. he founded the non-profit charity Clearwater Initiative in order to continue that work.

Since its establishment just two years ago, ClearWater has provided more than 6,500 people with clean, sustainable drinking water, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what the Initiative plans to accomplish.

Please take a few minutes to read more about the ClearWater Initiative here.

From Global Atlanta, excerpt:

A common practice in the United States that probably goes unnoticed by most people completely baffled Derreck Kayongo.

He arrived in the U.S. from Africa 15 years ago and was staying at a hotel in Philadelphia, when he noticed that the cleaning crew would replace the bathroom soap each day, even if the bars were only slightly used.

“I called my Dad back home and told him, ‘You wouldn’t believe what happens here. They throw away soap that is used only once,’” said Mr. Kayongo.

His father, a former soap maker in Uganda, chalked it up to America’s wealth. People there can afford to waste soap, he said.

“We laughed about it,” said Mr. Kayongo. “But the idea stuck in my head. What if we took some of this soap back home, recycled it, made brand new soap and gave it to people who didn’t have a single bar of soap?”

After years of pondering the question, Mr. Kayongo, a field coordinator for Atlanta-based relief agency CARE International, this year launched an effort to collect used bars of hotel soap and recycle them for use in refugee camps in Uganda. He sees it as a way to fight the spread of disease and allow U.S. hotels to help Africa while also reducing the amount of trash they are paying to have hauled away to landfills.

From the Guardian, excerpt:

The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead.

Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.

“The mother couldn’t bring the dead body and she doesn’t want to leave it as well. She was standing … holding the baby. She didn’t know what to do … At the end, because of the shell bombing and people rushing – there were thousands and thousands of people, they were rushing in and pushing everyone – she just had to leave the baby at the side of the road, she had to leave the body there and come, she had no choice. And I was thinking in my mind ‘What have the people done wrong? Why are they going through this, why is the international government not speaking up for them? I’m still asking.”

Four months later and Gnanakumar is sitting on a cream leather sofa in the living room of the family home in Chingford, Essex, reliving the final days of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.

For most of those four months, the 25-year-old British graduate was imprisoned behind razor wire inside the country’s grim internment camps, home to nearly 300,000 people. She was released last week, partly as a result of pressure from this newspaper, and flew back into London on Sunday.

The last time she publicly spoke about the conflict was from the hospital where she was working inside the ever-shrinking war zone in Sri Lanka’s north-east. Then, the national army had surrounded the small sliver of land where the remnants of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas held out and where hundreds of thousands of civilians had taken refuge. She had been in despair: a shell had just struck the hospital and dozens were dead. “At the moment, it is like hell,” she said then.

Gnanakumar was one of a small group of medics treating the wounded and providing a running commentary to the outside world from behind the lines. For months she had managed to stay alive while around her thousands died. At night, she lived in bunkers dug in the sand. During the day, she helped in the makeshift hospitals, dodging the shells and the bullets, tending the wounded and the dying, as the doctors tried to operate with butchers’ knives and watered-down anaesthetic.

Now her damning account provides a powerful rebuke to the claims of the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers was achieved without the spilling of a drop of civilian blood.

More about Sri Lanka’s civil war in my previous posts.

From Newsweek, excerpt:

Picture Mogadishu in 1992. Marauding militias loyal only to Somali clan leaders stalk the city, looting aid shipments bound for the 1.8 million Somalis facing starvation. Then, from the green-blue Indian Ocean waters, there materializes a flotilla of U.S. transports bearing aid and armed men to deliver it. In the skies overhead, U.S. attack helicopters appear, providing cover for food shipments, while an American spy plane circles the city night and day gathering intelligence on militias trying to disrupt the rescue effort.

Flash forward 17 years to the same city, still surrounded by squalid refugee camps. More than twice as many Somalis are now teetering on the brink of starvation in what many view as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Militias of heavily armed young men still stalk the city hijacking aid shipments. This time, though, no one’s coming to the rescue.

Somalia is in dire straits—maybe worse than ever. An estimated 3.8 million need humanitarian aid (fully half the population), according to the U.N.’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia, which calls the crisis the worst since 1991–92. In the past six months alone, the number of people forced from their homes by fighting—between the country’s barely functional transitional government and Islamist insurgents—has grown by 40 percent, to 1.4 million. Most live in squalid camps that a new report from Oxfam calls “barely fit for humans.”

So why don’t we care anymore? The answer lies not only in how the giant U.S.-U.N. mission to Somalia came undone—in the ashes of the Black Hawk Down firefight in October 1993—but in a legacy of failures by both Somali and Western leaders to cure the country’s ills.