My sleeping bag remains MIA, so I hope one can be found either in my apartment or in Will's abyss of a car trunk in the next few hours. Otherwise, this will be a much chillier first night of Net Strike than I originally anticipated. Good thing I took advantage of REI's fall member sale a few weekends ago.
Blogger's video-blogging feature isn't working tonight, so YouTube comes to the rescue.
My first YouTube production! (side note: my mom has successfully navigated YouTube multiple times before I even tried, including the most recent screening of a wild turkey "chase" around our front yard in Duanesburg)
Nightly Net Strike Trivia Tidbit
(or the grimace-inducing NNSTT if you prefer acronym-ing, as we frequently do in the public health world)
According to the World Health Organization (WHO)'s latest estimates, an African child dies of malaria every 45 seconds. So every minute you spend mindlessly surfing facebook or checking out the headlines of nytimes.com (both of which are an occasional past-time of mine), somewhere in Africa, a child loses his or her life to malaria's lethal grasp. At least two children have been struck down by malaria just in the time it has taken me to type these few sentences, edit a few misspellings, and briefly think of what writing such a statement means. Every 45 seconds. A new grave is dug. A new family mourns the loss of a child, most likely one who hasn't even reached his or her fifth birthday.
Do you remember your fifth birthday? Although I can't say with this 100% confidence (ha yes, this is my IHME training coming through - we're never 100% sure!), I'm pretty sure I had a wonderful fifth birthday. A fifth birthday filled with giddy and sugar-crazed friends, manic playing, bountiful gifts, and excitement for the upcoming school year. Many - if you can call nearly 1 million each year simply "many" - children in Africa never see that fifth birthday, never see a future that you and I have thus far enjoyed, all because of malaria. The disease accounts for over 20% of all childhood deaths in Africa, which is a horrible statistic in itself, but what makes it unequivocally unacceptable (from my perspective) is that every one of those deaths are preventable.
We have effective medicines to treat malaria. We have prevention methods - like bednets and indoor spraying of insecticides - that work. But due to factors like high costs, poor distribution chains, and inadequate information transfer, these medicines and these preventative interventions frequently fail to get to the people who need them the most. I will speak much more to these issues in future posts, but these are the obstacles that organizations like Malaria No More seek to overcome with their innovative fundraising campaigns and implementation activities. I care deeply about these malaria control - and ultimately policy - problems, and because Malaria No More uses such creative approaches in engaging the public about malaria and improving malaria control at the community levels in Africa, I have happily worked with them through Team Malaria No More and the Malaria Griot program for the last two years.
And with that, I best finish up some readings and start layering up for my first night of Net Strike! Again, please forward this blog to whomever you think may be interested; after all, when you're sleeping under the frosty Seattle skies to raise money for malaria, any support - financial or otherwise - is immensely appreciated. Remember, I'm sleeping under a bednet in Seattle for the next 14 days or until "Lives for Lubomba" raises $10,000 for Tanzania's malaria control programs. You get to decide.
Good night!
Nancy
Net STRIKE! I'm sleeping outside under a bednet in Seattle so children in Tanzania can too. I'll sleep out on the deck, bednet overhead, until November 4 (i.e., when I leave for the NYC marathon) or $10,000 is raised for my Team Malaria No More fundraising campaign, Lives for Lubomba. To support this campaign, simply scroll down the page to the button "Click Here to Donate Now." Thanks so much for your support, "saving" me and children's lives in Tanzania.
