World Malaria Day – Los Angeles
Throughout the entire world, organizations are partaking in the first ever World Malaria Day. We are conducting a lunch workshop at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Please R.S.V.P. right now and enjoy a free lunch during this awareness campaign!
Right now I urge you to donate as much as you can to fighting malaria. You can sponsor Save My Soul – Music to Prevent Malaria by donating right now directly to purchase mosquito nets. When you donate directly, 100% of your donation goes towards purchasing mosquito nets. What’s even more exciting? You can track exactly where your nets are distributed! Please donate right now. Something as simple as a $5 donation can help protect a mother and her children under a mosquito net for up to 6 years! We are aligned with Against Malaria to purchase mosquito nets, the group has already raised nearly 3 million dollars, help us reach 3 million dollars today.
Please also take time to check out our brand new list, 101 Ways to Prevent Malaria. And if you haven’t taken the time to purchase the album, please purchase it now!
Please take action to help raise awareness about malaria today.
We recently created this video to encourage YouTube viewers to start thinking about malaria. Please help us get this video out further by sharing it with your friends or using your webcam to post a response on YouTube.
APRIL 25, 2008 is the First Every World Malaria Day!
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April 25, 2008 at 10:36 am
Dave Donelson
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.