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Nothing But Nets

Watch the video and learn how Nothing But Nets is fighting malaria:

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Nothing but Net’s campaign to prevent malaria

All material taken from http://nothingbutnets.net.  All proceeds from clicks to fight Malaria will go to the task force at the NothingButNets to provide nets to fight this awful disease.

Malaria Kills

Malaria is a disease caused by the blood parasite Plasmodium, which is transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria, from the Medieval Italian words mala aria or “bad air,” infects more than 500 million people a year and kills more than a million— one person dies about every 30 seconds. 

Malaria is particularly devastating in Africa, where it is a leading killer of children. In addition to being home to the deadliest strain of malaria and the mosquito best equipped to transmit the disease, many areas in Africa lack the proper infrastructure and resources to fight back.

The disease is a self-perpetuating problem with large-scale impact on societies and economies. Malaria accounts for up to half of all hospital admissions and outpatient visits in Africa. In addition to the burden on the health system, malaria illness and death cost Africa approximately $12 billion a year in lost productivity. The effects permeate almost every sector. Malaria increases school absenteeism, decreases tourism, inhibits foreign investment, and even affects the type of crops that are grown.

Malaria is Both Preventable and Treatable

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.

Malaria has been brought under control and even eliminated in many parts of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Yet in Africa, with increasing drug resistance and struggling health systems, malaria infections have actually increased during the last three decades.

Bed Nets

Despite the magnitude of the problem, there is a simple and cost-effective solution to prevent malaria deaths. For just $10, we can purchase a bed net, deliver it to a family, and explain its use. Bed nets work by creating a protective barrier against mosquitoes at night, when the vast majority of transmissions occur. A family of four can sleep under an insecticide-treated bed net, safe from malaria, for up to four years. The benefits of bed nets extend even further than the family. When enough nets are used, the insecticide used to deter mosquitoes makes entire communities safer—including even those individuals who do not have nets.

Although $10 for a bed net may not sound like much, the cost makes them out of reach for most people at risk of malaria, many of whom survive on less than $1 a day. Nets are a simple, life-saving solution, but we need your help to provide them to those in need.

Anti-Malarial Drugs

Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are the most effective drugs currently available for treating malaria. Less expensive ACTs need to be developed and strategies to deliver them need to be implemented and evaluated so that the therapies can be accessed by the people who need them. Artemisinin-based combination therapies are also used to help pregnant women by administering at least two monthly treatment doses of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. More than 70 percent of pregnant women in Africa attend prenatal clinics at least once during their pregnancy. A regime of SP helps protect pregnant women from possible death and anemia and also prevents malaria-related low birth weight in infants, which causes about 100,000 infant deaths annually in Africa.

Killing Mosquitoes through Indoor Residual Spraying

While bed nets are generally effective in Africa wherever they are consistently used, sometimes specialized teams are organized to spray an insecticide on the inside walls of houses (a process known as Indoor Residual Spraying or IRS). IRS kills female mosquitoes when they rest on sprayed surfaces after feeding on a person, reducing malaria transmission to others. Only female mosquitoes can transmit malaria. In special circumstances, teams are also organized to eliminate or treat mosquito breeding sites with another type of environmentally friendly insecticide. However, because the African malaria mosquitoes are so prolific and have such a broad range of breeding habits, this type of “larval control” may not be applicable in some areas.

Life-Saving Facts

• For just $10 we can buy a bed net, distribute it to a family, and explain its use.
• Long lasting 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.

Other Facts & Historical Anecdotes about Malaria

• Only female mosquitoes can transmit malaria.
• Malaria’s etymological roots are in the Italian language, and “malaria” translates literally as “bad air,” a reference to the early belief that the disease was caused by breathing the stale, warm, humid air found around swamps.
• Four Nobel prizes have been awarded for work associated with malaria to Sir Ronald Ross (1902), Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1907), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1927), and Paul Hermann Müller (1948).
• Two important, currently used anti-malarial drugs come from plants whose medicinal values have been noted for centuries: artemisinin from the Qinghao plant (Artemisia annual, China, 4th century) and quinine from the cinchona tree (South America, 17th century).

*FACT CHECKED BY THE US CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL
AND PREVENTION (CDC)

 

PETA

Watch PETA’s portrayal of the factory farming system of modern agriculture and the effect it has on the lives’ of animals:

 

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The fight for ethical treatment of animals

All material taken from http://goveg.com  All proceeds from clicks to support equal rights for animals will go to the task force at PETA to fight this cruelty.

The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise their families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything that is natural to them. They won’t even feel the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

Animals on today’s factory farms have no legal protection from cruelty that would be illegal if it were inflicted on dogs or cats: neglect, mutilation, genetic manipulation, and drug regimens that cause chronic pain and crippling, transport through all weather extremes, and gruesome and violent slaughter. Yet farmed animals are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain than are the dogs and cats we cherish as companions.

The factory farming system of modern agriculture strives to maximize output while minimizing costs. Cows, calves, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and other animals are kept in small cages, in jam-packed sheds, or on filthy feedlots, often with so little space that they can’t even turn around or lie down comfortably. They are deprived of exercise so that all their bodies’ energy goes toward producing flesh, eggs, or milk for human consumption. The giant corporations that run most factory farms have found that they can make more money by cramming animals into tiny spaces, even though many of the animals get sick and some die. Industry journal National Hog Farmer explains, “Crowding Pigs Pays,” and egg-industry expert Bernard Rollins writes that “chickens are cheap; cages are expensive.”

They are fed drugs to fatten them faster and to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise kill them, and they are genetically altered to grow faster or to produce much more milk or eggs than they would naturally. Many animals become crippled under their own weight and die within inches of water and food.
While the suffering of all animals on factory farms is similar, each type of farmed animal faces different types of cruelty.

• Chickens killed for their flesh in the United States are bred and drugged to grow so quickly that their hearts, lungs, and limbs often can’t keep up. Read more about chickens.
• Hens used for eggs live six or seven to a battery cage the size of a file drawer, thousands of which are stacked tier upon tier in huge, filthy warehouses. Read more about laying hens.
• Cattle are castrated, their horns are ripped out of their heads, and third-degree burns (branding) are inflicted on them, all without any pain relief. Read more about cows raised for their flesh.

• Cows used for their milk are drugged and bred to produce unnatural amounts of milk; they have their babies stolen from them shortly after birth and sent to notoriously cruel veal farms so that humans can drink the calves’ milk. Read more about dairy cows.
• Mother pigs on factory farms are confined to crates so small that they are unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably. Read more about pigs.
• Fish on aquafarms spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy enclosures, and many suffer from parasitic infections, diseases, and debilitating injuries. Conditions on some farms are so horrendous that 40 percent of the fish may die before farmers can kill and package them for food. Read more about fish.
• Turkeys’ beaks and toes are burned off with a hot blade. Many suffer heart failure or debilitating leg pain, often becoming crippled under the weight of their genetically manipulated and drugged bodies. Read more about turkeys.

When they have finally grown large enough, animals raised for food are crowded onto trucks and transported over many miles through all weather extremes to the slaughterhouse. Those who survive this nightmarish journey will have their throats slit, often while they are still fully conscious. Many are still conscious when they are plunged into the scalding water of the defeathering or hair-removal tanks or while their bodies are being skinned or hacked apart.

 

 

Carter Center and the Guinea Worm Eradication Program

Watch the video to learn more about this disease:

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Guinea Worm Eradication Program

All material taken from http://www.cartercenter.org  All proceeds from clicks to fight the eradication of Guinea worm will go to the task force at the Carter Center to fight this awful disease.

Often known as the “fiery serpent,” Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) has existed since ancient times, but an international coalition led by The Carter Center is now close to eradicating it. With its access to world leaders, the Center is mobilizing government officials and garnering support for the Guinea worm disease eradication effort, while working at the village level to empower and educate communities to take simple measures to prevent the disease from recurring.

How Guinea Worm is Contracted

Guinea worm disease is contracted when a person drinks stagnant water that is contaminated with microscopic water fleas carrying infective larvae. Inside a person’s body, the larvae grow for a year, becoming thin thread-like worms, up to 3-feet-long. These worms create agonizingly painful blisters in the skin, through which they slowly exit the body. People with emerging worms must not bathe or step in sources of drinking water, because a worm will release hundreds of thousands of eggs, or larvae, into the water. Water fleas then eat the larvae, and people who drink unfiltered water from the pond become infected — continuing the life cycle of the parasite.

Prevalence of Guinea Worm

When The Carter Center began leading the campaign to eradicate Guinea worm in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of the disease in 20 countries in Africa and Asia. Today, there are fewer than 10,000 cases in five African countries—Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Mali. 

Where Guinea Worm is Found (PDF)

Country-By-Country Count (PDF)

Number of Cases 1989-2007 (PDF)
Activities by Country

Impact on Communities

The presence of Guinea worm disease is an indicator of extreme poverty, including the absence of safe drinking water, in a community. Entire communities suffer, not just the individuals afflicted with Guinea worm disease. Victims are totally incapacitated as a worm emerges from their body. Children cannot attend school. Farmers cannot farm.

Communities suffer food shortages when their residents are unable to work. In southeastern Nigeria, rice farmers in a single county lost $20 million in just one year due to outbreaks of Guinea worm disease.

Treatment for Guinea Worm Disease

There is no vaccine or medicine to treat or prevent Guinea worm disease. Infected people won’t even realize they have it until a year after drinking contaminated water, when they will develop blisters as the worm begins to emerge. Once that happens, a local health worker or the patient will wrap the live worm around a piece of gauze, extracting it from the body little by little. The long, painful process often takes up to one month.

Preventive Measures

Health education and low-technology measures to promote behavioral change are used to prevent Guinea worm disease. The most effective way to prevent it is to filter the tiny water fleas out of drinking water. The Carter Center provides families with fine-mesh filter cloths that fit over clay pots used to hold water.  Some people, especially nomadic groups, receive pipe filters, which are small straw-like personal filters that can be worn around the neck.  These simple but revolutionary devices enable people to drink water safely no matter where they are.

Other important interventions include treating ponds with a safe chemical larvicide called ABATE©, donated by BASF, and constructing boreholes or deep wells.

Banishing a Disease Forever

Humans are a Guinea worm’s only host, so spread of the disease can be controlled by identifying all cases and modifying human behavior to prevent it from recurring.  Once all human cases are eliminated, the disease will be eradicated. Today, cases of Guinea worm disease are down more than 99% since 1986, making it poised to be the next disease after smallpox to be eradicated.

It will be the first parasitic disease to be eradicated and the first disease to be eradicated without vaccines or medicines. The only other “active” eradication campaign is against polio. The Carter Center’s International Task Force for Disease Eradication has identified only six diseases as potentially eradicable.