This week, I learned that Jordan, the girl in the Bite Back video went out and secured a $20,000 foundation grant for antimalarial bed nets. Not bad for a 16 year-old. Not bad at all.
In the last couple of months, youth workers and kids have popped for 10,000 nets (Jordan's grant bumps that to 12,000). If you'd like to pitch in — you can buy a net for ten bucks ($10 U.S.); so why not pick up the tab for ten...or a hundred... — drop by BiteBack.net
Below, you'll find the digital movie I made with Compassion and Youth Specialties (and the talented Brian Boyle) as the year began.
In 1983, when I first engaged the conversation about ending poverty, the working number of deaths due to preventable causes was about 42,000 per day — these are fatalities statisticians lump together as excess deaths, meaning they don't have to happen. Causes of excess deaths include war, water-borne illnesses, preventable and treatable infections — things like that. In 2007, despite all hell breaking loose in a lot of places on planet earth, the number of excess deaths was about 27,000 a day. 27,000 needless deaths every day is stunning and inexcusable. It's also a third fewer than in 1983. As Scott Todd, the very bright man who directs Compassion's Special Operations (including HIV/AIDS and Malaria Interventions) told me: "If we can shrink it from 40,000 to 27,000, there's no reason to believe we can't shrink it from 27,000 to zero."
This video describes in four and a half minutes how malaria deaths — about a million of them a year and way more children than adults — can be stopped cold for less money than the U.S. spends every week in Iraq.
This is as close to a no-brainer as I've ever seen... Malaria bites. Buy a net. Save a life. Bite Back
