Nothing But Nets Blog

We’re excited to share an update from the ground in the Central African Republic, with our partner PSI (Population Services International). Danwe N'Dikwe, a PSI program manager in Central and West Africa, talks about his personal experiences with malaria, the life-saving nets you’ve helped send to C.A.R., and the partnerships that will help us reach the global goal of ending malaria deaths by 2015.

We’re well on our way to delivering a net to every family in C.A.R., And together, with your support and through partnerships like this one with the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets, PSI, and the UN, we truly can cover a continent. Enjoy the video, and stay tuned for more updates from C.A.R.!

As Nothing But Nets supporters, we know you’re committed to helping others. One year ago today, we asked you turn your compassion you have for sending nets and saving lives to those affected by the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Your response was overwhelming -- thousands of you joined the UN Foundation in helping the United Nations in Haiti by contributing to the UN’s Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF).

Including your contributions, the UN Foundation community has helped to raise nearly $4 million, with funds going to:

• The UN’s Central Emergency Relief Fund; to help provide food, medicine, water, and shelter immediately following the earthquake.
• The UN Development Program’s Cash-for-Work program; an initiative to offer Haitians temporary jobs while repairing the damage.
• The UN Population Fund; to provide maternal health kits and solar-powered street lamps to help keep women and girls safe at night.

Hwang Young-kyu, a university student in Busan, South Korea, first joined the movement to end malaria on his campus. He helped set up illuminated bed net displays in the center of Seoul, the capital city, to spread the buzz and raise funds for life-saving nets.

After graduation, he took his compassion and leadership skills to his new job at a bank. During job training, he educated his new colleagues about malaria, and each of his classmates sent a net with their first paychecks! Together they sent 40 life-saving nets to Africa.

Mr. Hwang told us, “I am very happy to have made this donation and I’ll never forget working as a team with my colleagues to send nets and save lives while taking the tough training course.” Now that’s employee bonding!

Over the past few months, you’ve learned about the often forgotten country of Central African Republic and the families there, who need your support and life-saving bed nets to protect themselves against malaria. Together with our Champion Mandy Moore, you’ve sent nets to C.A.R. and then asked your co-workers, friends, and family to help out.

Our supporters all over the world -- from university students in Korea to Boy Scouts across the U.S. to people just like you -- have truly stepped up to the plate for the people in C.A.R. There are so many ways you’ve made a difference in the efforts to cover every family in the Central African Republic!

Supporters around the globe will be thrilled to open up their homepages today and see us featured on AOL.com!

Nothing But Nets is featured in an ad on the AOL.com homepage, highlighting the urgent need to ‘Send a Net. Save a Life.’  AOL.com is an internationally-viewed website with 15 million daily users. Nothing But Nets will be on the site for the entire day, reaching those users with the simple message that malaria kills. Partnerships like this help spread the buzz about the disease that takes the life of a child every 45 seconds.

The AOL.com cause marketing feature will also highlight the United Nations Foundation and the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign in the coming weeks. You can show your support by following AOL on Twitter, and while you’re there follow us too!

Nigerian mosquitoes will have a tougher time spreading disease, thanks to a new product in development by our partner, Vestergaard Frandsen: Net Curtains. These curtains will be similar to life-saving bed nets because they are treated with an insecticide that kills the insects that land on it. This extra layer of protection will help families during the day, when they do not have the coverage of their bed nets. And, since the curtains come in different colors, they can help brighten up a home!

Now, these curtains are not meant to replace bed nets. While the curtains are helpful, they do not offer the same necessary nighttime protection of bed nets. Since the mosquitoes that carry malaria bite at night, it’s still extremely important for families to be sleeping under their bed nets. But with this extra layer of protection in the home, families are a little safer during the day from insects that carry other diseases. To learn more about the Net Curtains, check out this article.

Last week we brought together our Nothing But Nets partners for a day of connecting, sharing, and planning here in Washington, DC. We had everyone here -- from Major League Soccer to the Boy Scouts of America to our faith-based partners -- among many others, giving us a chance to update our partners on our collective progress as a campaign and in the movement to end malaria, as well as brainstorm opportunities for the years ahead.

This was our second Partner Summit and we’re grateful for our partners taking a full day out of their busy schedules to meet before the new year. The day was hugely productive -- we shared supporter stories, our successes, and lessons from 2010, and discussed opportunities to further raise awareness and help send more nets to save more lives.

The World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2010 shows the substantial progress made in malaria control and prevention, and outlines the work still needed for eventual elimination.

There’s a lot of great news in the report, thanks to the dedication of organizations like The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; partnerships like Roll Back Malaria; and the hard work of supporters like you:

• Global funding for malaria has steeply increased in the past decade. 
• This funding has resulted in “tremendous progress” in increasing available nets.
• By the end of this year, 289 million nets will have been delivered to Sub-Saharan Africa since 2008. This is enough to cover 76% of the 765 million people at risk of malaria.
• 23 countries in Africa have adopted the WHO recommendation to provide nets to everyone at risk of malaria -- an increase of 13 countries since 2008.

About a year ago, actor and UN Goodwill Ambassador Edward Norton was looking for a way to raise money for one of the charities he supports by running the New York City Marathon. He wanted to spread the word about his fundraising project and help others raise money for their own favorite causes, and noticed there wasn’t a platform for everyone to share the causes they’re passionate about. So Edward and a few others started Crowdrise -- a fun site where anyone can create a project to benefit any charity they believe in:

Our goal at Crowdrise is to make fundraising so fun and addicting that everyone wants to do more of it. The power of the crowd is real, lots of small donations really do add up, and the Crowdrise community can have a monumental impact on causes around the world.

We think it’s a great idea -- so Nothing But Nets has created a charity profile and Champion Mandy Moore has started her very own project to help us reach our 2010 goal of sending nets to every family who needs one in the Central African Republic.

A recent study from the Malaria Journal has shown that bed nets, in combination with indoor residual spraying (IRS), and malaria treatment have a major impact on child health in Africa. This study combines health data from a several countries in Africa and looks at the correlation between children’s health and the use of bed nets in family homes. And in just the last five years, the scale-up of bed net use has helped reduce overall childhood deaths by 20%.

The study took into account other health factors such as nutrition and HIV/AIDS treatment, and still found that bed net use was responsible for a remarkable improvement in children’s health. For example, in Zambia, the scale up in net use led to a major drop in overall child mortality rates, with a 29% reduction in children aged 0-5 years old.

We’re seeing more and more data lately that shows impressive progress in the movement to end malaria deaths in Africa. Just recently, the announcement was made that a child dies from malaria every 45 seconds, instead of every 30 seconds. And while this information is promising, it means that we still have work to do to send nets and save lives!

A new report published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the primary United Nations health agency, urges countries with endemic malaria to keep better track of the medicines used to treat malaria patients, particularly the drug artemisinin. 

Say it together: Artemisinin (Are – tuh –miss – i –nin). Artemisinin.

Why the focus on keeping tracking of this medicine, among others?

According to a recent article, artemisinin is “the most effective treatment against malaria” and, by accurately tracking its use around the world, resistance to the drug can be tracked.  As time passes, over-use and over-reliance on one medicine to treat malaria patients (in this case, artemisinin) can weaken the medicine’s ability to fight the parasite that causes malaria -- this is called drug resistance. 

According to a study published in Nature, new information about malaria has come from an unlikely source: gorilla dung. It was previously believed that malaria first jumped into the human population from chimpanzees. However, recent studies of dung samples have shown, in fact, that malaria spread from gorillas several thousand years ago. While this work certainly isn’t glamorous, it does shed some light on an important factor in ending malaria deaths.

The study showed that the malaria parasite likely jumped from gorillas to humans from a mutant parasite in just one gorilla thousands of years ago. So gorillas today carry a different kind of malaria parasite than the one that is transmitted to humans. This means that if we were to get rid of malaria, it is unlikely that the parasite would be reintroduced by gorillas again -- it’s likely that it’ll be gone for good. Of course, in order to accomplish that goal, we need to continue to focus on malaria prevention methods like sending life-saving bed nets.

The full story can be found here.

Today, on World AIDS Day, we’re proud to support the work of The Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis. The Global Fund is an innovative global public-private partnership which raises and disburses funds to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. According to new results, Global Fund-supported programs are saving 4,400 lives each day and, by the end of 2010, they will have saved an estimated 6.6 million lives. 

As the largest funder of malaria prevention and treatment programs in the world, “The Global Fund…reported progress in the fight against malaria, with a cumulative total of 160 million insecticide-treated bed nets delivered through its funded programs to families at risk of contracting the disease. Several large bed net distributions are underway, which will mean that by year-end, there will be significant further progress towards the target of reaching every family in sub-Saharan Africa with an insecticide-treated bed net.” Read the full statement from the Global Fund here.

While we were in the Central African Republic with Mandy Moore earlier this fall, we had the opportunity to see the work of the Global Fund in the field:

Thank you for joining Nothing But Nets and the Global Fund in the movement to end malaria.

Our Champion Mandy Moore recently wrote about her trip to the Central African Republic with Nothing But Nets and PSI on The Huffington Post. Here's an excerpt from her post (and you can read the full article here!):

My experience was life-changing, and the many special moments and people from my trip are always on my mind. I can't forget one family in particular.

One of the most-heartbreaking moments I experienced was when I visited a small clinic outside of Bangui, the capital city. The clinic staff sees an average of 40 patients with malaria every day. One of the patients I met was a beautiful baby girl. Her father, Remi, held her tight in his arms. You could barely hear him as he talked. At this point he was overcome with desperation. He was so scared and his face showed signs of many sleepless nights, worrying about how he would make his daughter well again. Her tiny body was limp and she was hot to the touch with a high fever and chills. Her malaria was in the advanced stages and she needed treatment urgently, but her parents couldn't afford it. This was the second time they had come to the clinic. The first time they came was when they found out their daughter was sick. They came back after the pediatric hospital turned them away because they couldn't pay. Remi had purchased a set of cheap syringes on their way back to the clinic, hoping doctors there would give him some medicine, which he would try to administer himself.

Happy Thanksgiving from Nothing But Nets! What are we grateful for this year? Supporters like you!

We’re thankful for the hard work and dedication that each of you have put toward spreading the buzz and sending nets to save lives. We are proud and excited to be supported by some of the most compassionate and caring people we’ve ever met. And we’re grateful for our amazing partners and Champions, each of whom contribute to the movement to end malaria in their own unique -- and powerful -- ways.

As one of our newest Champions, Mandy Moore, said while in the Central African Republic, “These families are just like families anywhere in the world.” Families in CAR are grateful for the work you’re doing to help them sleep safely at night, and so are we! Together, we are saving lives and making a huge difference for families in Africa by helping to protect them from malaria.

From the Nothing But Nets family to yours, we wish you a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

Bright and early Friday morning, (actually, it was so early that it wasn’t yet bright) Nothing But Nets Director Adrianna Logalbo, Danielle Garrahan, and I headed down to ABC’s Good Morning America studios to support one of the show’s guests -- and our newest Champion -- Mandy Moore. During her interview, Mandy spoke about her trip to the Central African Republic with Nothing But Nets, and how easy it is to send nets and save lives. Watch the clip and see some footage of Mandy delivering and hanging nets!

When you’re done watching, consider getting a head start on your holiday shopping by sending a net on behalf of a loved one. With every donation, you can send an adorable holiday card, and help Mandy Moore support Nothing But Nets in getting a net to every family in CAR by the end of the year.

This fall, the Senior High Youth at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas hosted an event called the Youth Malaria Weekend to raise awareness about malaria and funds to send life-saving bed nets to the Central African Republic.

To get the buzz going within their congregation, the group invited fellow church members to a special presentation. Together, they discussed the importance of malaria over a delicious, authentic Tanzanian meal.

To further raise awareness, the youth group spent the night sleeping outside, under bed nets -- prompting questions from passers-by and highlighting the importance of using a net, since malaria-carrying mosquitoes only bite at night.

Beth Stephens, one of the participants, said, “The weekend widened my view of the world and inspired in me a desire to make a difference.” And they certainly did make a difference! Not only did the group educate their community about malaria, they raised enough funds to send more than 520 bed nets to Africa. What a great way to have an impact both around the corner and around the world!

Today the Nothing But Nets campaign marked its four year anniversary of sending nets and saving lives! Having been with the campaign since its earliest days, I marvel at how far we have come thanks to our incredible partners and our committed supporters -- YOU. Four years ago we were in New York City launching the Nothing But Nets campaign with the National Basketball Association’s NBA Cares, the United Methodist Church, and Sports Illustrated. We were just beginning to spread the buzz about malaria and how easy it is to help -- trying to get information about this relatively forgotten disease into local communities and onto the front pages.

Now, four years later, we have started a movement to end malaria deaths in Africa. Over the years our partnerships grew - from sports leagues to businesses to youth organizations -- and our supporters got busy, raising awareness in their communities and raising funds through bake sales, basketball tournaments, and birthday gifts. We now have hundreds of thousands of committed supporters who in their own ways are champions in the fight against malaria.

One of our partners, the Boy Scouts of America, recently showed us just how effective social media can be to spread the buzz about malaria. On their Facebook page, BSA held a contest to win a special Nothing But Nets patch: scouts had to be the first to answer a question about malaria correctly.

BSA posted questions for six days -- and the response was overwhelming! Thousands of scouts participated, chiming in the correct answers to the questions below. Do you know the answers as well as the scouts do? (If not, find them here!)