Check out this great news on rotavirus, courtesy of Candace Rosen at PATH (from PATH’s RotaFlash newsletter), which you all helped to support with your advocacy for GAVI last spring!
Diarrhea is the third biggest killer of children under five years of age in Zambia (40 per day; 15,000 each year), and rotavirus, the most common cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children, is responsible for nearly one-third of those deaths. As in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest rates of rotavirus mortality worldwide, rotavirus contributes heavily to the tremendous drain on the health and economic resources in Zambia:
Approximately 41 percent of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea are infected with rotavirus.
An estimated 4,506children under age five die from rotavirus diarrhea annually.
Vaccines are the best way to protect children in Zambia and the rest of the world from severe rotavirus diarrhea and the deadly dehydrating diarrhea that it causes.
Dr. Clarisse Loe Loumou of GAVI’s Civil Society Organization Constituency makes a major announcement that will affect the health of millions of children around the globe.
During my years of practice in the largest pediatric hospital of Cameroon in Yaoundé, I remember that the 300 beds were rarely empty. I was in charge of the gastroenterology and paediatric nutrition ward, where 28 beds were occupied more than 90 percent of the time by infants who were dehydrated and suffering from severe diarrhea.
Our problem was not the diarrhea itself — its treatment protocols are well known; oral re-hydration salts, adequate re-nutrition, zinc supplementation, intravenous (IV) fluids for the most severe cases — but in making real the possibility of preventing severe diarrhea. It was and still is common for children in Cameroon and other parts of Africa who are suffering from severe diarrhea to die due to limited access to oral re-hydration salts, IVs, clean drinking water, or even the inability to reach a hospital in time.
Last month, we launched “Vaccines and Voodoo in Benin, Africa,” an original documentary that reports on some of the unique partnerships that the medical officials and voodoo practitioners in Benin have made to help save lives through vaccines. But it looks like those who work on child health in the country will have a lot more work to do in the coming weeks.
Just one week after the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations’ (GAVI) successful pledging conference, Helen Evans, interim CEO of GAVI, dropped by ONE’s DC office this week to say thanks. Check out her heartfelt message to all the ONE members around the world who campaigned on behalf of GAVI and child vaccines:
You probably already heard the good news this week, but public and private donors committed a total of $4.3 billion from now until 2015 in support of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). This means GAVI and its partners are headed toward saving four million children’s lives in the next five years.
This great news made headlines all over the world. You can read some of this week’s US media coverage of the pledging conference below including a mention of ONE’s statement in a White House blog post and an article from TIME magazine on how the vaccine conference was a victory for global health.
Help us thank Congress for their efforts to win a US pledge for vaccines that will save the lives of millions of children.
On Monday morning, ONE members woke up to the fantastic news that the Obama administration had pledged $450 million over the next three years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), making clear that GAVI is a priority in the president’s global health agenda.
What you may not know is that Congress helped elevate GAVI on the president’s agenda. Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate weighed in, expressing their support for this program which has delivered vaccines to more than 288 million children since 2000. Several members, including Rep. Heath Shuler and a bipartisan handful of senators sent letters of support.
For months now, we’ve been asking our ONE members to give it all they have on our vaccine campaign. We asked our members to use every advocacy tool and skill they had to make sure that we won this important fight to save 4 million children in five years. We all worked so hard to generate more than 150,000 signatures on our petition, we placed thousands of calls, we wrote thousands of letters and emails, and we used Twitter to make sure our voices were heard.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
