Nothing but nets

This summer I stumbled upon the "nothing but Net's" campaign to deal with the challenge of Malaria in the world.

The UMC is a partner....

So my church sold the shirts "Buzzkill" and we encouraged offerings, and sent over $6000.00 to the Nothing but nets fund. Then other than wearing our shirts... we kinda forgot about it.

then...last week the washington post and new york times both ran articles stating:

“We saw a very drastic impact,” said Dr. Arata Kochi, chief of malaria for the W.H.O. “If this is done everywhere, we can reduce the disease burden 80 to 85 percent in most African countries within five years.”

The report was done by a team from the World Health Organization for the Global Fund, the chief financing agency for combating malaria. It looked at programs in four countries that tried to distribute mosquito nets to the families of every child under 5, and medicines containing artemisinin to every public clinic.

In Ethiopia, deaths of children from malaria dropped more than 50 percent. In Rwanda, they dropped more than 60 percent in only two months.

Zambia, Dr. Kochi said, had only about a 33 percent drop in overall deaths because nets ran short and many districts ran out of medicine. But those areas without such problems had 50 to 60 percent reductions, he said.

Ghana was a bit of a mystery, according to the report. It got little money from the Global Fund, Dr. Kochi said, and so bought few nets and had to charge patients for drugs. Malaria deaths nonetheless fell 34 percent, but deaths among children for other reasons dropped 42 percent.

Rwanda, a small country that handed out three million nets in two months in 2006, had 66 percent fewer child malaria deaths in 2007 than in 2005.

Ethiopia, much larger, took almost two years to hand out 20 million nets; it cut deaths of children in half.

God uses us little by little around the world to make differences.... amazing...less than 6 months after we gave...God continued to do a miracle...amazing...

Duane