Tag Archives: rotavirus

Toilets, Nerds, and the Importance of Advocacy

Global Health, Public Health, Water and Sanitation, , , , , , , , , ,

Last Friday November 19 was World Toilet Day, and many events took place to observe this occasion. One of which took place in DC, an event called Nerd Nite. This event occurs once a month and features intellectual presentations on a variety of topics, with entertainment in between each presentation. The latest Nerd Nite included a presentation by Hope Randall of Path. End the Neglect was there to capture Hope on film (which we will have up shortly), and she’s been kind enough to provide us a blog post below:

Reprinted with permission from DefeatDD.org.

By: Hope Randall, Program Assistant for PATH’s diarrheal disease communications and advocacy team

I spent last Friday evening celebrating toilets and talking to a group of nerds about the deadly global impact of diarrheal disease and the solutions to defeat it.

Public speaking doesn’t typically make me nervous, but on Friday, I took advantage of my free drink ticket before taking the stage to talk to a group of young DC professionals about diarrhea. While this topic is familiar enough in global health circles, I’m never quite certain how the public at large will react. Will they laugh without taking the message seriously? Wrinkle their noses in disgust? Lose attention completely?

My concerns were completely unwarranted. As I presented “The Scoop on Poop,” we laughed together at potty humor and edgy communications strategies, then easily segued to the heart of the matter: that while we have the luxury of laughing about toilets and poop jokes, children around the world are dying from a lack of water and sanitation commodities that we consider as basic as air. I was touched by the level of instant engagement and the genuine eagerness of the average person to lend a hand. I felt a sense of camaraderie when I announced that it was World Toilet Day and the crowd whooped and cheered. Continue reading →

Some Thoughts About Water

NTDs, Public Health, Water and Sanitation, , , , , , , , ,

By: Nate Wolf

I had a water emergency at my house this weekend, and I’ve been thinking a lot about water.

Pros and Cons of Water

Pro:  It keeps us alive.  Con:  We need it to stay alive.  Pro:  It tastes delicious when you’re thirsty.  Con:  Causes a lot of damage when it floods your basement or your house or your entire city.  Pro:  You can clean things with it.  Con:  Since we need it every day, people may have to either spend a lot of money on piping, plumbing fixtures, etc., or walk a couple of hours to the river just to carry back a few gallons.  Pro:  If you have some barley and hops (whatever hops are) you can make beer with it.  Con:  It is an important part of the life cycle of several of the world’s most devastating diseases, those diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest people, such as malaria and  several of what are known as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), including schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, and lymphatic filariasis.  Pro: It makes crops grow.  Con:  If crops don’t get it, they won’t grow.  Con:  Drinking bad water can cause other types of diseases, such as cholera or rotavirus (rotavirus also spreads in other ways, making it particularly dangerous).  Pro:  Water can be used to create energy.  Con:  Watering crops with infected water is one way to spread , the most common of all NTDs, affecting an estimated 800 million people around the world1.

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The need for vaccine support in the developing world

Global Development, Global Health, NTDs, Public Health, , , immunication, measles, millenium development goals, , , , ,

Vaccines have been responsible for preventing countless numbers of death throughout the world. In the cases of rotavirus diarrhea and pneumococcal pneumonia, new vaccines stand to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year from these diseases within the developing world. In fact, immunization is one of the most cost-effective methods of intervention in child health. Despite this fact, still 2 out of 5 children under five years old die from either diarrhea or pneumonia. The issue can be traced back to the lack of resources that the global community is neglecting to allocate to developing vaccines for these diseases. Such allocation is important to reaching Millennium Development Goal 4, which is to reduce under-five child mortality by two-thirds by 2015. This goal can not be achieved without commitment from the global community to support immunization.

There is hope yet based on our history with vaccines. UNICEF’s Measles Initiative and Rotary International’s Polio Eradication Initiative are two examples of successful programs that lead to the eradication of two highly infectious diseases.

Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan discusses in depth of the importance of vaccines in the developing world in their co-authored blog post featured on the Huffington Post.

In regards to controlling and eliminating neglected tropical diseases, The Carter Center has a Schistosomiasis Control Program as well as a Guinea Worm Eradication Program both in Africa. These programs target school-aged children, who are most vulnerable to these diseases, and widely distribute drugs within communities on a yearly basis.

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The Final Hurdle to Universal Rotavirus Vaccine Introduction

Global Development, Global Health, poverty, Public Health, , , , ,

By: Dr. Ciro de Quadros, Executive Vice President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute

The burden of rotavirus is well known, particularly amongst the global health community. It’s a leading cause of death amongst children under five. The virus claims the lives of more than 500,000 children each year and causes the hospitalization of millions more.

Almost half of the 500,000 lives lost are African children, and six of the seven countries with the highest infant mortality rates from rotavirus are in Africa. Yet only one African nation, South Africa, has introduced rotavirus vaccine into its national immunization program. Just 2 percent of the continent has access to rotavirus vaccines; how can this be?

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