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Monday, November 17, 2008

Be a Netraiser.

Ten bucks doesn't buy as much as it used to, but it's enough to save a life. When you donate $10 to Nothing But Nets, the malaria mosquito net campaign of the UN Foundation, you will send a net and save a life, by protecting someone from the deadly malaria parasite.

Now you can join the So What Can I Do Netraiser team to raise money for more nets. Our goal is $4350 because this is the 435th post on So What Can I Do Why should you join? Because NETS SAVE LIVES. Want to know more?

--> 41% of the world's population lives in places where it is (Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, Hispaniola, and Oceania).
--> Over one million people die each year from malaria, most of them young children.
--> In some parts of the world where transmission rates are high, there can be as many as 2 deaths per minute from malaria.
--> Life-saving treatments for malaria are relatively inexpensive: $0.13 for chloroquine, $0.14 for sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, and $2.68 for a 7-day course of quinine.
--> "Insecticide-treated bed nets can reduce transmission as much as 90% in areas with high coverage rates."

Your ten dollars goes solely to providing the insecticide-treated net and education a family on how to use it. It lasts 4 years and can mean life for a pregnant woman, HIV positive person, or young child. So . . .

Be a netraiser. Be a buzzkill. Send a net, save a life. Join the So What Can I Do Netraiser Team and put your ten bucks to good use.


"The failure of attempts at culture have led me to believe that the microbe of malaria lives outside the body in the parasitic state and I suspect in the mosquitoes which are abundant in malarial areas and which already play a very important role in the propagation of filariasis." - Alphonse Laveran in 1894, winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

2 comments:

Karama said...

This just in . . .

Dear Karama,

Last week, as we celebrated the two-year anniversary of the Nothing But Nets campaign, one million children in the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire received life-saving bed nets, all thanks to your generosity. I had the opportunity, along with 35 United Methodists from the Texas Annual Conference, to witness this incredible effort and report back each day on the success. Click here to watch my video report from a distribution site in Côte d’Ivoire.

On Saturday I met Beatrice, a net recipient, in her home. She greeted us graciously with her young son, Samuel, close by her side, who was shy but intrigued by the visitors. Beatrice had walked to the market on the first day of the campaign, four days earlier, to get her son vaccinated against measles and get him an insecticide-treated bed net. Her reluctance to show me the bed net was only because she didn’t have time to clean her home for visitors, but she ultimately agreed. And there, hanging over the bed she sleeps in each night with her young son, the bed net was hanging, in all its blue glory.

I have never been so proud of the work of the Nothing But Nets campaign than when I saw that bed net hanging in Beatrice's home. That one bed net represented the thousands of supporters I have met across the country raising awareness about malaria in their communities, the tens of thousands more who have contributed to sending nets, and the millions of others we hope will join this effort in the years to come.

I hope we can all celebrate what we have done together - 2 years, more than 20 million dollars raised, and over 2 million nets distributed to children in Africa. But the faces of the children in Côte d'Ivoire remind me that combating malaria is not just a worthy, humanitarian cause, it is a necessity. Each day we needlessly lose 3,000 children to this disease.

Together we are saving lives. Together we distributed a million nets to children in Côte d'Ivoire. Together we can save more.

Send a net. Save a life.

Thank you,

Adrianna Logalbo
Deputy Director, Nothing But Nets
http://www.NothingButNets.net/

Karama said...

An earlier post on malaria prevention through bed nets.