Friday, December 15, 2006

New links to good causes....

Those of you who have been obsessively reading our two-post blog (and really, who hasn't been?) will have noticed a slight change. We now have two new entries in the "links" section, to Malaria No More and Nothing But Nets. Nothing But Nets is an amazing effort put together by Sports Illustrated, and you can read more about it here and here.

Malaria, for those with less morbid reading habits than mine, is a mosquito-transmitted disease that kills over one million people, every year. Most of these are children under the age of five. If you click on one of the two links, you will be taken to a site where you will learn as much as you care to know about this disease and the efforts being made to combat it. You will also be given the chance to make a fairly straightforward transaction.

Donate $10, save the life of a child.

Malaria is almost exclusively a disease of the poor, because the methods to prevent it are almost pathetically simple, effective, and cheap. Unless, of course, you are living in an impoverished village in Africa, in which case even the most basic of measures is far beyond your reach. Ten dollars covers the cost of purchasing and distributing an insecticide-treated bed net. Bed nets protect the children during the night while they are sleeping and the mosquitoes are most active, and have been proven to drastically reduce malaria cases and deaths.

Ten dollars to save a child's life. You won't find many better deals than that.

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