If you watched Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Impatient Optimists” presentation, you probably remember this discussion about rotavirus, and the deadly impact it can have on children:

The Living Proof Project also has this great corresponding photo gallery documenting clinics in Managua and Pantasma, Nicaragua where great progress is being made in the administering of rotavirus vaccines.

You can check out the full gallery by clicking the image below:

Yesterday we blogged about Jessica Uno, a junior at Stanford University who is reporting on the ground in Kenya through Malaria No More. In the past few days, Jessica has been posting some terrific and insightful accounts of what she’s seen, including this report from Mwea Mission Hospital.

Excerpts from the post below. You can continue follow Jessica’s trip in real time on MNM’s Buzzwords Blog here.

Once we arrived at Mwea, we met Dr. John, director of the Vector Control Center at Mwea Mission Hospital. The outdoor hospital is four hours away from the next hospital and served a large patient body. The large rice paddies in that region force hospitals to be far apart. Dr. John and Jane told us about how they had reduced malaria occurrences to almost 0% in the area surrounding the hospital, through a combination of prevention and treatment measures. They pushed large campaigns to encourage the community to consistently sleep under pesticide-treated bed nets and made sure powerful ACTs were readily available for those with malaria. A large problem in applying our existing tools for fighting malaria is patient compliance. You can give a bed net to family, but if left alone, families will often misuse them or use them inconsistently. The same goes true with ACTs – often patients feel better after a day or two of treatment and stop taking their medicines. Creative strategies are necessary to motivate consistent net usage and compliance with malaria treatments. One of Mwea’s strategies includes portraying nets as “fashionable,” by having respected community leaders show friends and families that the frequently using nets are critical to avoiding mosquitoes. Malaria is preventable and not a fact of life, using the slogan “mosquito out, we are in the net together!” Rather than imposing the nets on the community, Mwea Mission Hospital was successful in encouraging net use in culturally sensitive, sustainable ways that actively involved community members.

Jessica Uno, a junior at Stanford University, recently won the “World Briefing: Telling the Malaria Story” contest, earning her a spot on the frontlines of the malaria fight. This week, she will be reporting from the 2009 MIM (Multilateral Initiative on Malaria Pan-African) Conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

Jessica will interview malaria experts and journalists; learn about new technologies and approaches to fighting the disease; and travel to a local clinic for an insider’s perspective on the malaria fight. She will report back on her findings and experiences via guest blog posts on our Buzzwords Blog and she’ll be Tweeting regularly from her Malaria No More twitter name, @JunoMNM.

The World Briefing contest is co-sponsored by Malaria No More and Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation and raises awareness about the race to save lives.

Be sure to check Jessica’s blog posts and follow her on Twitter to get the inside scoop on the latest news and trends from the front-lines of the global effort to end malaria deaths.

As part of the Living Proof Project, which we’ve covered extensively here on the ONE Blog, the Gates Foundation has posted this photo gallery following women at the Osu Maternity Home in Accra, Ghana. It’s part of a larger discussion about the benefits and techniques of breastfeeding, which were also examined in this infographic.

Africare, a partner organization devoted to improving lives and building futures, also tells the stories of individuals making a difference in Africa. Enter “Pass It On”. Through a new series of 16 videos, one featured each month, Africare hopes to connect the development work Africans are doing in different countries. Certain challenges, including access to clean water and the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS are being met through community efforts to battle poverty and disease.

This month, meet Alassane and see the wonderful work he is doing in Mali. You can find more info and the inspiring clips here.

GiveVaccines.org wishes you a Happy and, most importantly Healthy, World Pneumonia Day. Today, we help raise awareness to fight pneumonia, a disease taking the lives of two million children each year. With increased awareness and aid, these deaths can be avoided. GiveVaccines.org is teaming up with WorldPneumoniaDay.org by donating all proceeds from November 1 thru November 30, 2009. Each time you log on to GiveVaccines.org and take part in our interactive vocabulary quiz game, you too will help fight the spread of pneumonia around the world.

GiveVaccines.org is a non-profit organization whose ultimate goal is to help prevent the spread of disease in the neediest areas of the world while providing an enjoyable tool for participants to improve their English vocabulary and medical terminology. All net proceeds from advertising revenues are donated to GaviAlliance.org and other affiliated organizations for the purchase of life-saving vaccines. Through support from the GAVI Alliance, low-income countries can access pneumonia vaccines for as little as $0.15 per dose., which equates to 150 accumulative correct answers on GiveVaccines.org. To play this interactive learning quiz, go to www.GiveVaccines.org

To commemorate the World Pneumonia Day, GiveVaccines.org has created a special category with regards to pneumonia. For this category, and each of the other categories, you will find 10 levels of difficulty. GiveVaccines.org will automatically adjust to words of varying levels of difficulty based on your performance. So, challenge yourself and your friends to see what level you can achieve. Visit GiveVaccines.org and help join the cause!

-Sam Rabinowitz, GiveVaccines.org

Today is World Pneumonia Day and you can watch the Global Pneumonia Summit live right now.

Child advocates from around the world are gathering in New York City to hear the latest on how we can raise the profile of child pneumonia and get policymakers everywhere to act.

Speakers include:

• Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the United Nations’ Secretary-General
• Singer-songwriter and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Angélique Kidjo
• ABC News’ senior health and medical editor Dr. Richard Besser
• WHO and UNICEF present a new report, the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia, which provides a road map for preventing and treat child pneumonia in the world’s poorest countries.
• And leading global health experts, philanthropists, faith-based leaders, corporate representatives and child advocates to begin to change the way the world responds to the #1 killer of children—pneumonia.

Dear ONE members,

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to give kids worldwide a fighting chance against pneumonia. Go to www.missionpneumonia.org, and play Save the Children’s new game. Find out about childhood pneumonia and how Save the Children works to help parents and community health workers overcome obstacles to treating a child whose life hangs in the balance.

On November 2, 2009, Save the Children is joining with other groups worldwide to bring attention to the terrible toll that pneumonia takes in developing countries. A child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds. That comes to about 2 million lives lost each year. But, with your help, more than 1 million lives could be saved by making affordable health measures available – including vaccines, and antibiotics – and by bringing health care closer to children’s homes. That’s just what Save the Children is doing every day to save children’s lives in 40 countries.

Now we’re enlisting you to help us prevent pneumonia from striking susceptible children and protecting their lives when it does. Here’s how:

• Play the game at www.missionpneumonia.org Learn what it takes to fight pneumonia around the world by taking our quiz.
• Sign the petition. Show your elected officials that you support expanding the reach of life-saving tools – vaccines, antibiotics and trained health workers – to more mothers and babies in poor countries.
  Pneumonia is the #1 killer of children under age 5, taking more lives than malaria, AIDS and measles combined. By accepting this mission, you can help keep kids healthy.

Thank you so much for your support,

-Mary Beth Powers, Campaign Chief, Survive to 5

Check out the latest partner post for our Food Security in Focus series, this time from Oxfam America. The post below describes an innovative way that Ethiopian farmers are dealing with the effects of climate change. Also be sure to check out an amazing video/slideshow by clicking on either of the images below.

-Kara Arsenault

Medhin Reda’s is an all-girl house—Medhin and three of her daughters. I knew the moment she brushed aside her daughter’s warning to dress up for her western visitors that I would like her enormously. She had just rushed in from weeding the corn patch, and she came to greet us outside her stone-walled hut high on a hill in Adi Ha—and as soon as she could, she would be back in that corn patch finishing the job.
All work. All day.

That’s the life of single mothers like Medhin here in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, where climate change is taking its toll. The rainfall is becoming increasingly erratic and making a living from the rocky soil is backbreaking and never certain. Drought can easily wipe out a season’s efforts. And hunger often follows.
But this year, Medhin, 45, has a plan. Though she doesn’t have a penny to pay for it, she has bought herself a small package of weather insurance. It’s for her teff, the tiny grain grown across Ethiopia that’s the base for a pancake-like bread called injera. If enough rain fails to fall at a certain time, the insurance will provide Medhin with a payout to cover some of her losses.

It’s a new initiative launched by Oxfam America and a host of local partners, including the Relief Society of Tigray. And its genius is in its accessibility to the poorest of the poor. Those who don’t have cash—and many don’t—can pay for their premiums with the single most important asset they do have: their sweat. Two hundred small farmers in Adi Ha signed up for the insurance; 65 percent of them are swapping work for premiums. They’ll be tackling projects that make them less vulnerable to drought.

Medhin is trading 24 days of labor for the comfort of knowing that if her teff crop fails for lack of rain, her family will get critical assistance in its time of need. The insurance will make sure of that.

“It’s good for me to have the insurance as long as I can work and pay with labor,” she said before heading back to her corn patch. “That is the only asset I have.”

-Coco McCabe, Oxfam America

Photos courtesy of Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Anyone who tuned in for Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Impatient Optimists” presentation on Tuesday got to see a very special performance courtesy of Vocal Motion 6, an a cappella group from Namibia who use their talent to educate young Namibians about HIV prevention.

Music is a particularly powerful way to reach a wide audience and hold peoples’ attention, so it’s great to see Vocal Motion 6 utilizing their talents– which are immense, as I can attest to– in this way.

The Living Proof Project chronicles their “Living Positive Tour” in this photo gallery. Click the image below to see for yourself: