FAMVIN: The International Vincentian Family

Despite world economic conditions Pope Benedict appealed today to world leaders to “courageously take and apply the necessary measures to wipe out extreme poverty, hunger, ignorance and the plague of pandemics, which above all hit the most vulnerable.”

There’s an extensive article in the Friday edition of THISDAY, one of Nigeria’s national papers, about the challenge of providing safe drinking water for everyone: “…women and children spend much of their lives in pursuit of this vital resource.” Read the story.

Having an enemy in common — malaria — has not meant that combatants agree about means and methods. This week’s publication of an internal document of the World Health Organization (WHO) that is critical of the Gates Foundation has turned the spotlight on some complaints. Read analysis in The Economist.

Promising results in Mali malaria vaccine trial
Gates Foundation grants for small scale farm programs in Africa and Asia
The Partnership for Prescription Assistance paid a visit to Ironton, USA

Malaria is back in parts of Perú. Read about probable causes. Repression of human rights and rampant infectious disease go together in Burma. See UC Berkeley’s report. In science this week, a discovery that having blood type “O” tends to provide protection from deadly effects of malaria. Read about it.

Peter Agre MD, who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry, will become director of the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He told the Baltimore Sun that malaria has long fascinated him because it is so deadly and so widespread. Read the Sun article and visit the Malaria Research [...]

Spend more on making indoor sprays available. That’s advice at the World Health Organization’s malaria evaluation meeting today in Burkina Faso. Sprays that include DDT are especially effective because they last longer on walls and are effective against mosquitoes. Read the story and visit WHO’s Web site about malaria.

naturenews reports that a trial vaccine against malaria has proven safe and effective for infants as young as a few weeks. In fact, the vaccine is most effective if given soon after birth. Read the article.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has recently announced that it has awarded a challenge grant to Nothing But Nets. That means they’ll match your donations dollar for dollar, net for net! For every bed net you send to a child in Africa, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will send one, too. That is [...]

Experts believe that more people are now dying of malaria that did so three decades ago, and warn that it is spreading to new countries.
The disease is now present in non-tropical countries such as Turkey and Russia. In addition, a handful of people die of malaria every year in the United States, a country that [...]