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Taking Kicks Against Malaria
Photos by Michael Stobe/Stobephotos
This weekend, I had the chance to represent Malaria No More and United Against Malaria—a new partnership of organizations, including ONE!, committed to fighting malaria—at the Nutmeg youth soccer tournament in Wilton, CT. On Sunday, Congressman Jim Himes (Connecticut-4), a member of the Congressional Malaria Caucus, joined 1,000 Connecticut kids to show his support for United Against Malaria.
While cheering on the youth players, Congressman Himes underscored the importance of supporting the ongoing fight against malaria, saying, “The chance to win a victory against malaria shows how we can reach ambitious goals both on the soccer field and in the global effort to improve health care worldwide.”
We couldn’t agree more! MNM had a great time hosting the United Against Malaria Speed Shot Contest, where players took time out from their team competition to test their individual skill, learn about malaria and help score against the disease! Families stopped by to donate a $10 lifesaving mosquito net and to learn more about United Against Malaria, and kids got the opportunity to take a shot and see how fast they could kick a soccer ball into a bed net goal. Winners in each age category received two tickets to a Major League Soccer game and United Against Malaria soccer jerseys.
Congressman Himes’s enthusiasm for the campaign was matched by the tournament organizers who saw the United Against Malaria campaign: “We are so proud to help raise awareness about malaria in the community and show our kids how they can help kids in Africa,” remarked Wilton Soccer Association President Andy Hoffman. “United Against Malaria shows just how important teamwork is to defeating malaria for once and for all.”
One thing was for sure: regardless of the final score, players at the Nutmeg tournament won a major victory against malaria. We hope that youth soccer players across the country will join us and the malaria community in standing United Against Malaria and help send malaria off the field for good!
-John Logsdon, Malaria No More
Ashton Sends Insecticide-”Tweeted” Nets to Africa with Malaria No More
Actor Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to one million followers on the social media platform Twitter at 2:13am EST Friday. To celebrate his triumph over the network giant, Kutcher is sending 10,000 mosquito nets to help Malaria No More fight malaria in Africa. This will help protect 20,000 children from this disease-and raise awareness just in time for World Malaria Day on April 25th!
Kutcher is highlighting World Malaria Day on April 25th by mobilizing his Twitter followers to tweet about the disease and donate mosquito nets to Malaria No More. On Tuesday, Kutcher realized that he had over 850,000 followers on Twitter (making his Twitter feed the third most-followed after Britney Spears and CNN) and the gauntlet was thrown! In only a few short days, he has gotten tens of thousands of people to sign up to help him reach his goal and send mosquito nets to Africa. CNN joined in the fun and tracked the race to a million on air and on the web, with Larry King and Anderson Cooper urging their viewers to put CNN over the top—but in the end, Ashton carried the day!
Ashton Kutcher is leveraging the incredible power of Twitter to catalyze one of the biggest pro-social movements in history. This is an amazing model of how modern technology and social networking can be applied to a social issue, inspire millions of people and help save lives. Follow Ashton and congratulate him for his great work and for helping to save lives from malaria at http://twitter.com/aplusk.
Malaria No More is determined to end malaria deaths and is using every weapon in its arsenal.including new technologies to fight an ancient disease. Twitter has emerged as a robust vehicle for raising mass awareness and rallying the world to say NO MORE to malaria deaths. Follow Malaria No More on Twitter at http://twitter.com/malarianomore.
-Emily Bergantino, Malaria No More
Counting Malaria Out
World Malaria Day is just around the corner on April 25th—just 615 days away from the malaria community’s deadline to achieve universal access to malaria interventions in Africa by December 31, 2010. This year’s timely World Malaria Day theme, “Counting Malaria Out”, keeps the pressure on to reach our goal and save lives from this preventable and treatable disease.
Every second counts. The world needs to intensify its efforts in the months to come, building on the momentum of the accomplishments of recent years: significant reductions in deaths, growing political will in Africa and abroad, and unprecedented public awareness. We’re in a race to end malaria deaths…and we need your help to get there.
Malaria kills a child in Africa every 30 seconds and costs the continent $12 billion every year in lost productivity. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have the tools and the programs in place to end malaria deaths—help us support Africa in its efforts to break the cycle of sickness and poverty.
This World Malaria Day, Malaria No More is urging US leadership for continued support in the winning battle against malaria. Malaria offers an incredible opportunity for return-on-investment—exactly what the world is looking for in this economic climate. Help President Obama keep his campaign promise of joining with the global malaria community to end malaria deaths by 2015.
Join us on World Malaria Day as we focus on “Counting Malaria Out” and be part of the first great humanitarian success story of the 21st century—making malaria no more for once and for all.
Find out more at www.MalariaNoMore.org.
-Emily Bergantino, Malaria No More
Baylor Fights Malaria
My campus ONE group “The ONE Campaign- Baylor” partnered with “Malaria No More” recently to help brighten the futures of millions of individuals around the world suffering from malaria. We conducted a three week initiative designed to promote both awareness on campus and raise money to purchase mosquito nets to prevent malaria.
ONE worked with Baylor professors to lecture on malaria, which included a collaborative effort from the schools of business, journalism, arts and sciences, and social work. The group also did tabling events and handed out information to organizations on how they could raise money. At the end of the campaign, we raised more than $700 to purchase life saving bed nets and signed up an additional 300 students for ONE!
A special thanks goes to APO Service Organization, Baylor Transfer Council, Alpha Delta Pi Sorority, and Baylor’s American Medical Students Association (AMSA).
-Justin Kralemann, Texas ONE Member
Breaking News: $3 Billion in New Malaria Funding!!
Reporting to you live from outside the 2008 MDG Malaria Summit…
At the 2008 MDG Malaria Summit in New York today, global leaders in health, government and business announced over $3 billion in new malaria money to help spur the world toward ending malaria deaths by 2015 - making it the single biggest day for malaria announcements in the history of the fight against the disease.
Speakers including Bono, Gordon Brown, Bill Gates, President Kagame of Rwanda and President Kikwete of Tanzania discussed how far the world has come in recent years to combat malaria and how far we still have to go. Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corporation and Malaria No More Chairman, helped moderate the event, adding that malaria is not an isolated disease but both a consequence and cause of extreme poverty.
Two of the biggest announcements were from the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, announced $1.1 billion as funding for Phase II of the World Bank Booster Program and Rajat Gupta, Chair of the Global Fund, announced Round 8 funding recommendations for malaria control efforts totaling $1.62 billion.
In celebrating the new commitments, grassroots support and political will that is driving the worldwide effort to end malaria deaths, event host UN Special Envoy for Malaria Ray Chambers urged the community not to become complacent. While today represents a big step forward, the race to end deaths - 3,000 children every day - is far from over.
For more information on the event and commitments, visit www.MalariaNoMore.org.
-Emily Bergantino, Communications Officer, Malaria No More
BedNet Delivery on the Zambezi River
I recently returned from Tete Province, Mozambique, where I helped to distribute bed nets and malaria medications to remote communities on the Zambezi River. I joined the adventurous and ambitious Roll Back Malaria Zambezi Expedition, a two-month voyage tracing Dr. David Livingstone’s trip down the river 150 years ago. The Zambezi Expedition aims to track successes and challenges of controlling malaria in six countries in malaria-endemic southern Africa: Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. I joined toward the end of the Expedition, during which crew members and medical teams have traveled more than 1,550 miles to deliver bed nets and medications to remote areas along the river, many of which are accessible only by boat.
We visited one village near the old colonial Boroma Mission, a few miles upstream from the city of Tete. Though we arrived only the evening before to tell the villagers that we would be coming to deliver bed nets, we found the entire village gathered, health cards in hand, early the next morning when we crossed the river from our campsite. They greeted us with impromptu singing and dancing, incorporating the sting of a mosquito’s bite and malaria’s fever and chills in their movements. One of the village women kept the crowd in gales of laughter as she mimed the mosquito’s treacherous path through the night to the sleeping victim. When we hung a bed net from a nearby tree to demonstrate how to use it, she crawled under it and pretended to sleep soundly and safely to illustrate the point.
The Zambezi Expedition’s goal is to show that coordinated action can force back the spread of malaria and help save millions of lives. As this visit showed, Africans along the Zambezi’s banks are eager to join in the fight against malaria—they have the energy, the drive and the dedication—all they need are the tools. The Expedition has drawn to a close, but the lessons of how international support and local implementation can and must go hand in hand are clear.
To learn more about the Roll Back Malaria Zambezi Expedition, go to
www.zambezi-expedition.org
-Emily Bergantino, Malaria No More
Going Going Ghana
(Martin Edlund of Malaria No More joined President Bush’s on the Ghana portion of the president’s trip to Africa.)
It was a day of firsts for me. My first time meeting a sitting president. My first time racing through streets in a presidential motorcade. My first time seeing malaria education set to music.
President and Mrs. Bush made malaria a big focus of their stop in Ghana, where they were joined by American Idol Winner Jordin Sparks and Malaria No More. Sparks opened a noontime event at the U.S. Embassy with a Super Bowl-sized rendition of the national anthem that made the speakers whimper and moved patriotic listeners to tears.
President Bush took the mic to praise American Idol for raising $17 million for malaria during last year’s Idol Gives Back charity special and share some exciting news:
This spring, Fox and American Idol will once again appeal to viewers to help defeat malaria. On April 9th, the show will raise money to fight malaria in Africa and support other worthy causes in the second round of “Idol Gives Back.” Laura and I hope, and Jordin hopes, that America’s generosity will still pour forth, and we ask our fellow citizens to contribute to this worthy cause. (Applause.)
(Read the full transcript here, including the President’s shout out to Malaria No More.)
It was a short event – half hour all told - but plenty long for us to sweat through our suits in the soupy afternoon heat. “This reminds me of what it’s like to campaign in Texas in August,†quipped a glistening Commander in Chief. Still, he took the time to press the flesh with the hodge-podge audience of scruffy PeaceCorps volunteers, Ghanaian women in traditional dress, and Idol-loving tweens.
Lunch was served on the Embassy lawn flanked by mini-golf versions of the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument while the bar offered bottles of Schweppes tonic in a subtle (okay, probably unintended) homage to the days when the quinine in tonic was used to ward off malaria.
From there, we raced off to Maamobi Polyclinic on the outskirts of Accra where Jordin and Mrs. Bush were greeted by a traditional durbar—a Ghanaian community gathering complete with song, dance, and umbrella-wielding day-glo chiefs.
Jordin and Mrs. Bush did a bed net demonstration and kids sang a malaria song withwith mosquito-wing choreography. It’s what happens when well-intentioned public health professionals try their hand at pop song. Sample lyrics:
From home to home
From school to school
Children are saying
Give us treated bednets
To keep us protected
But if malaria attacks
For lack of protection
Give us early treatment
To save our lives
Somewhere Simon Cowell is scowling fiercely. For my part, I’ll stick with Jordin’s single “Tattoo” which I’m rocking on my (Product)Red iPod as I write this.
-Martin Edlund, Malaria No More
“Sparking” Interest in Malaria
American Idol winner Jordin Sparks is sitting on the concrete floor of the airport here in Accra, Ghana thumbing away at her iPhone when she’s approached for her first autograph. “Of course,” she says, flashing the brillian smile that helped her to win over millions of Idol voters. She’s delighted and a bit surprised to be recognized so far from home.
Jordin has come to Ghana with Malaria No More to participate in the President’s trip to Africa and learn more about malaria, a disease which kills an estimated 900,000 Africans each year, mostly children and pregnant mothers.
Last year’s Idol Gives Back charity special raised $75 million for charities in American and Africa, including $17 million to fight malaria. Malaria No More used part of that money to protect 2 million moms and kids with insecticide treated bed nets in Angola, Madagascar, Mali, Uganda, and Zambia. The President and Mrs. Bush appeared on last year’s Idol Gives Back to thank viewers for their support. Now Jordin’s here to return the favor.
Today, she’ll appear alongside the First Couple at a series of events highlighting the US President’s Malaria Initiative, a $1.2 billion five-year program operating in 15 African countries and is just getting underway here in Ghana. She’ll do a bed net demonstration alongside Mrs. Bush at a malaria clinic on the impoverished fringes of Accra this afternoon. On the drive back from the rehearsal yesterday, our photographer, a cheery Ghanaian named Jeff, said that households in the area are stricken with 1 malaria case every month on average, a consequence of their windowless cinderblock homes and lack of bed nets. Malaria accounts for 22% of deaths among children under five here in Ghana and 44% of health clinic visits.
Tomorrow, we’ll head out into the field with a USAID rep named Bethanne to see the impact of malaria on rural communities and get a look at what they’re doing to fight back. Stay tuned. And if you’d like to help make a different, donate $10 for a bed net at www.MalariaNoMore.org.
-Martin Edlund, Communications Director, Malaria No More
This Just In
Videos from the Gates Foundation’s Malaria Forum below.
See Bill Gates’ first post on the ONE Blog here.
An Audacious Goal
This week in Seattle, an extraordinary group of people – scientists, policymakers, and advocates – came together for three days to discuss what can be done to stop malaria. Melinda and I issued a challenge to those attending the meeting. We asked them to begin charting a course to eradicate malaria – not just to control or reduce it, but to work toward a time when no one on earth is infected with malaria, and no mosquitoes carry the disease.
Today, malaria kills more than one million people every year, most of them children in Africa. That’s the equivalent of losing every student in the New York City public school system in one year.
We know that eradicating malaria is an audacious goal. But advances in science and medicine, new political commitments, and the dedication of people like you have given the world an historic opportunity to conquer malaria. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly, but I’m optimistic that we can make this disease history.
At the forum in Seattle, Melinda and I called on the U.S. presidential candidates to commit to expand the President’s Malaria Initiative, a great program started by President Bush. I hope you will join us in asking all of the candidates to make this pledge and keep the fight against malaria on the national agenda.
I am confident that together, we can produce the energy, compassion, and commitment needed to win the fight against malaria.
-Bill Gates
*** To view a webcast of the Seattle malaria forum, visit www.kaisernetwork.org/healthcast/malariaforum2007. For more information about how you can help fight malaria, visit ONE.org.
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TAGS: Malaria, Malaria No More, Spotlight, United Against Malaria