The Lancet earlier this year said that 1/3 of the child and maternal deaths every year are due to chronic malnutrition. The Copenhagen Consensus (with 5 Nobel Laureates) issued a press release at the end of May saying that if you look at everything from AIDS to terrorism, the world’s best investment for undernourished children, is vitamins. With zero to spend on research and not having to search for decades to find the ‘cure’, we can get basic nutrition (read; vitamins) today to children all over the world and in the process save millions of children’s lives. Millions. Maybe not genocide but still what is it when you have the ability to save millions of children’s lives and you do nothing?
There are lots of ways to get involved. The organization that I founded and now champion, Vitamin Angels, is one way. We’d love to have you get involved with us by holding a fundraiser, doing an education evening in your home, helping us get the word out to your email list, my space or facebook contacts. But Vitamin Angels isn’t the only way you can make a difference. If you’re already doing something, please tell us your story.
BTW – tomorrow I’ll tell you about Eliana and Angelina, just like I promised.
| July 17th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Is Vitamin Angels only in the US or is it also in other countries such as Europe, Canada?
| July 18th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Vitamin Angels has strong support in Canada and we’ve done distributions in Eastern Europe. The lion’s share of our work gets done in a belt that stretches from Central America, through the Caribbean, into Africa, across to South Asia and includes the Pacific Region. These are the areas with the highest rates of low birth weight babies (a classic sign of chronic malnutrition), stunting (small for age), wasting (underweight for age), vitamin A deficiency, anemia, iron deficiency and the list goes on. In these regions children die from simple infections, childhood illnesses and something as common as diarrhea just because their immune systems are too weak to fight back. With two high dose vitamin A capsules a year (at a cost of 25 cents for everything from procurement, to transportation, education and admin), you can literally increase a child’s survival rate by 23%. It doesn’t take a lot to have an enormous impact in these children’s lives.