Doug Van Pelt

World Malaria Day

Okay, that's enough slagging on me for one day. After all, there is something much more important to blog about -- today is World Malaria Day, and this is serious. When we were in Uganda back in February, I wore clothes that had been soaked in DEET and wore repellent on all my exposed skin. I was a total germaphobe. It freaked me out knowing that one mosquito bite could give me a disease. Almost all of the people we talked to in homes and projects (especially the young mothers), we asked if they had mosquito nets. Many said no. I slept under a net each night in our nice hotel room. I can only imagine what sleeping on a dirt floor with no net would be like.

Malaria kills 1 million people each year. Most who die of this treatable, preventable disease are children. A gift to Compassion's Malaria Intervention Fund will help Compassion-assisted children and their families receive the resources they so desperately need to fight this deadly disease,
including:

€mosquito nets to protect children from mosquito bites €malaria prevention education €access to malaria medical treatment for those struggling with the disease

A little goes a long way:
-$30 will provide three mosquito bed nets.
-$50 will provide five mosquito bed nets.
-$100 will provide 10 mosquito bed nets.

To donate and help "bite back" against the mosquitos, donate to Compassion International.

And, to personalize this with my amateur-informed political rant: If environmentalists and politicians wouldn't have panicked about the so-called dangerous effects of DDT (from what I understand, it is a poisonous insecticide, but only in grossly negligent massive overdoses is it a bad thing to people and the environment), we would not have this huge epidemic. Can you believe that? I mean, sometimes politics and misinformation ends up killing millions. If the DDT scare had not happened, the mosquito-spread malaria problem would not have existed. Again, I'm just a hack, but if this is true, how sad. Now people are dying of a disease that could've been prevented. Now, that's neither here nor there, since we are dealing with an epidemic killer disease at the moment. This argument won't help anything. The treatment of this problem is what will help now, and the mosquito-net initiative that Compassion International has will go a long way in preventing this disease for many. It's practical and affordable for us to help.

Posted by Doug Van Pelt at April 25, 2008 02:20 PM