Charity Miles is a new free app for Android & Apple that turns you into a corporately sponsored athlete walking, running, or biking for a charity of your choice! Just choose a charity and press start. As you walk, run, or bike, the app tracks your distance and you earn money for your charity. Bikers earn 10¢ per mile; walkers and runners earn 25¢ per mile, all up to the initial $1,000,000 sponsorship pool. As you walk, run or bike with Charity Miles, you also help attract more sponsors to increase our sponsorship pool for everyone.
When you finish your Charity Miles session you can share your achievements with friends & followers on Facebook & Twitter. It also illustrates your impact for you, for example if your charity is The Nature Conservancy a 3.23 mile jog gives 8,083 breaths of fresh air. Charity Miles is a fun new way to stay motivated with your workout, to work together with family and friends to raise money for causes, and to literally make every step count.
Plumpy’nut is a peanut-based paste in a plastic wrapper for treatment of severe acute malnutrition. It is made of peanut paste, vegetable oil, powdered milk, powdered sugar, vitamins, and minerals. This simple concoction manufactured by Nutriset, a French company, is changing the way malnutrition is dealt with in children, and by extension, changing the way the world deals with food shortages and famine.
Before the development of Plumpy’nut and supplements like it children needed to be hospitalized for extended periods of time to receive intravenous fluids. There are often hundreds and sometimes thousands of children suffering from malnutrition when food shortages occur. All of these children used to have to be crammed together with their families in hospitals and make-shift health centers. They all needed to be tended to by doctors. With the arrival of innovative solutions like Plumpy’nut only the most extreme cases of malnutrition require hospitalization. That means less doctors, less nurses, less beds, less tents, less medical equipment to transport and maintain. Overall, it means fighting famine just got a whole lot cheaper.
Take for example the current crisis in the Sahel belt of western Africa. A number of unfortunate factors have come together to create a devastating food shortage. It has not yet crossed into the realm of famine but is skirting that very thin line. Labels aside, this shortage is leaving thousands of young children suffering from acute malnutrition. With Plumpy’nut in hand aid workers can not only treat children at hospitals and aid centers but, since Plumpy’nut doesn’t require refrigeration and comes wrapped in foil parents are able to feed it to their children on their own. Because of this it’s possible that with enough support the various groups, governments, and NGOs may yet be able to head of another terrible famine in Africa.
If you are interested in joining the fight against famine you can give to World Vision’s hunger fund and your donation will provide 5 times its value in life-saving emergency foods like Plumpy’nut, along with seeds, livestock, and other items that combat food shortages and hunger.
In a wonderful instance of what Nicholas Kristof refers to as “bridging the God Gulf” – two people of different religious beliefs (ie. liberal atheists and conservative Christians) working together for a common good – atheist Kristof and obvious Christian Pastor Bill Hybel of Willow Creek Community Church, one of the largest churches in America came together to discuss the plight of women and girls around the world.
Nicholas Kristof discussed his book Half the Sky with Pastor Bill Hybel and his congregation, and then Pastor Bill turned the tables and had Kristof preach a 3 minute sermon, which was very insightful.
The video clip is 30 minutes long, but they’re 30 minutes of gold. Kristof explains what he’s learned through years if experience, that there is no silver bullet for solving the worlds problems, but our hope for the future rests with women and girls. If women and girls can be educated, given rights, and protected the global population will shrink, become healthier, become better educated, and become more peaceable. Sounds good to me.
UPDATE: I disconnected the link. Willow Creek Community Church updated its media page and now, for the life of me, I can’t find the Kristof video anymore. I’ll keep searching, but if anyone else runs across it before I do please, please, please, email me, or post it in a comment.
In The Atlantic today there is an article about a video game where players help real doctors diagnose malaria. At UCLA gamers are on the brink of becoming the latest line of defense against malaria. UC researchers have developed a free, Internet-based pattern recognition game based on images of real life blood cells. The hope is that the online tool will cut down the amount of time it now takes to distinguish infected red blood cells from healthy ones. So far, the volunteer players have diagnosed malarial blood cells with about as much accuracy as a trained pathologist.
Gamers begin with a short tutorial where they first learn the characteristics of an infected blood cell. Next, they’re presented with a 6-by-8 grid of blood cells. The object of the game is to use one tool to neutralize bad cells and another to select all the remaining healthy cells. Once they’ve cleared a stage, players are presented with another grid to analyze.
In developing nations where malaria is rampant and doctors are scarce analyzing blood samples is a time-consuming process and often, time is of the essence. Having lots of unskilled gamers do the legwork not only speeds things up, but also improves the accuracy of the diagnosis, researchers say.
Similarly, at the University of Washington developers have created a game where players wrestle with ways that proteins can fold themselves into different configurations. They call it FoldIt. Understanding the role that proteins play in a disease can help scientists crack a pathogen’s code, and can help in the creation of new synthetic proteins in drug research.
One of the results of this new hybrid between games and medicine is this:
A small group of enthusiastic gamers on a site called FoldIt recently solved the structure of a protein found in an AIDS-like monkey virus. The structure had stumped scientists for over a decade; the gamers, incredibly, cracked it in less than three weeks.
This concept of integrating gaming with medicine could possibly revolutionize medicine both in the developing world and at home. To think, maybe the next “time-waster” game you download could be literally saving lives.
Saturday marked the beginning of World Immunization Week. The WHO is uniting countries across the globe for a week of vaccination campaigns, public education, and information-sharing under the umbrella of World Immunization Week. Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents debilitating illness, disability and death from vaccine-preventable diseases such as diphtheria, hepatitis A and B, measles, mumps, pneumococcal disease, polio, rotavirus diarrhoea, tetanus and yellow fever. In fact, 2-3 million deaths are averted annually due to vaccination. The goal of this worldwide collaboration is to boost momentum and focus on specific actions such as:
raising awareness on how immunization saves lives;
increasing vaccination coverage to prevent disease outbreaks;
reaching underserved and marginalized communities ― particularly those living in remote areas, deprived urban settings, fragile states and strife-torn regions ― with existing and newly available vaccines; and
reinforcing the medium- and long-term benefits of immunization, giving children a chance to grow up healthy, go to school and improve their life prospects.
Also happening this week, Shot@Life is celebrating their national launch on Thursday, and hosting a Twitter party from 9am to 12pm EST #vaccineswork. From 9am-10am Learn about vaccines with @shotatlife, @unfoundation, & @amillionmoms. Learn how to get involved with Shot@Life with the Champion hour hosted by @shotofprev from 10am-11am. From 11am-12pm hear stories from the field hosted by @gatesfoundation.
Celebrating this awesome event with Shot@Life is a great way to take part in World Immunization Week. Invite your friends to the Shot@Life Twitter party. Many people don’t understand the value of vaccines or the distance a few dollars can go in giving children a chance at a lifetime of firsts. World Immunization Week is a great opportunity to get involved with the global fight against devastating but preventable childhood diseases.
For a quick look at the devastating effects of childhood disease, and in turn, the world-changing power of vaccines, check out The Salk Vaccine Turns 57.
It seems worlds away, but there was once a time – just ask your parents or grandparents, because it was only 57 years ago – that children everywhere were crippled by polio. It would sweep through every summer like some sort of biblical plague, and leave behind its telltale trail of crutches, wheelchairs, leg braces, deformed limbs, iron lungs, and child-sized coffins. Then, on April 12, 1955, in Ann Arbor Michigan Dr. Jonas Salk’s injectable polio vaccine was declared “safe, effective, and potent”.
As a new mother, I can’t possibly imagine the fear of knowing that every summer my child’s number might come up. Would he be strong enough? Would he survive? What would his quality of life be afterward? And then to hear that there was a vaccine that would save him and all other children, I can’t imagine a better feeling. Except, maybe, when Dr. Salk announced that he was not going to patent the vaccine, that he would choose not to profit from it, to give it to the world. “Could you patent the sun?” he said.
A few years later, Dr. Albert Sabin developed the OPV – oral polio vaccine – and the world was once again changed forever. Because of its low cost and ease of use, the OPV has made it possible to imagine a world where every single child, rich and poor, is protected from polio. Since the World Health Organization (WHO) launched its polio initiative in 1988, OPV has reached billions of children and the number of reported polio cases is down 99%. Countries the world thought would struggle with polio forever are now on the brink of being totally rid of the disease. India, one such country, just celebrated its first year without a single case of wild poliovirus, and countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan are not far behind.
The WHO says the world faces “the best—and perhaps last—chance to stop polio forever.” There has only been one disease ever eradicated from the planet, and that’s smallpox. We are literally just a few years away from completely eradicating polio. The best way that you can help stop polio from ever making a comeback is to support the WHO Global Polio Eradication Initiative. It is also essential that until polio is completely eradicated every child born gets vaccinated. It doesn’t take much for a small outbreak to undo all the hard work of the WHO, Dr. Sabin, Dr. Falk, and countless other medical professionals who have traveled into secluded areas, stopped children at bus stations, and dedicated their lives to ending the polio nightmare, once and for all.
For other ways that you can help fight polio, and the other diseases that steal a lifetime of firsts from thousands of children every year, visit my friends at Shot@Life. Together with these groups, we can save children now and forever from the horrors of polio.
Dream of Opporunity is a young organization (founded in 2011) that strives ”to improve quality of life of in-need communities [in the US and Latin America], providing education opportunities and covering first-need human survival tools to ensure self-sustainability and growth.” Pretty straight forward, right? That’s what I find so refreshing about Dream of Opportunity: They’re focused on the basics.
People can’t improve their lives if they’re exhausting themselves just struggling to survive. Once you make sure the babies are healthy, no one is worried about food security, and people have shelter then, you offer them education. Human ingenuity and drive takes over from there, and then you get progress. Educated children grow-up, go to university, become professionals, and work to improve the lives of their family back home. An educated child is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s a wonderful concept for a non-profit, one that’s surely able to “work itself out of a job” - in a few hundred years, once they’ve helped make self-sufficient and self-sustainable all the vulnerable communities in the US and its southern neighbors.
At this time, Dream of Opportunity is involved in two projects both serving the South American nation of Colombia. One is the Sebastian Perez College Fund. Sebastian Perez is a 16 year old boy who saw his father stabbed to death as a child, suffered through his mother’s attempted suicide and conviction for the murder of his father, was eventually abandoned by both sets of grandparents, and now works to put himself through high school, attend said high school, feed himself, and help care for his older sister and her child. He admits to being lonely, but he ”wants to be better than everything that has happened to me, and eventually when I have a family, I want to be able to provide for them and give them all they need.” Sebastian wants to be an industrial designer and has plans to go to Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, but right now he cannot afford it. Touched by his story, Dream of Opportunity is trying to establish a scholarship for Sebastian that will allow him to achieve his dream of becoming “better than everything that has happened to me”.
Dream of Opportunity’s other project is with the Tama-Paez is an indigenous community located in Huila, Colombia. The Tama-Paez community, like so many indigenous communities is self-sustained, very respectful of Pacha Mama – Mother Earth – and determined to conserve their language and customs. But now, there is no one left to teach their native language to their children, and their only hope is to hire a professor, whose salary alone would be very expensive. But, their children also need a place to learn, food to eat during school hours, uniforms, and supplies. They used to walk the 10 mile hike to the nearest stores to get supplies, but bad weather and failing crops have made this task almost impossible. The Tama-Paez people create beautiful crafts that they usually sell to make an income, but since the market is 10 miles away on a bad road few people are able to make the trip. Dream of Opportunity has decided to make a fund to be able to first get the children the professor that will teach them their native language, and also to build a library where the children can have an environment to study, work, and be safe when the winter rains hit. Dream of Opportunity is also accepting clothing donations for children ages 2-18. Please email info@dreamofopportunity.org for important instructions regarding clothing needs.
Take a moment to explore Dream of Opportunity, find them on Facebook and Twitter @DreamofOpp. Spread the word and support them however you can. You can’t have too many organizations like these around.
