Tagged: mosquito

  • In the beautiful and remote Cambodian province of Pailin, FHI 360 is working with rural communities to reduce malaria transmission and save lives.

    With support from the Global Fund through the Village Malaria Workers program, FHI 360 has trained people in 28 villages across this region to provide malaria education, diagnosis and treatment. Village workers have provided malaria testing to 13,351 fever patients in these remote areas, and have treated over 3,000 patients for malaria.

    This World Malaria Day, visit Pailin by video. Your guide is an FHI 360 malaria program coordinator who shares how the program works.

    Visit this page for more information about our recent work in Pailin, Cambodia.

  • The MAM program – led by FHI 360, GSMF, LSHTM and Health Partners Ghana, and funded by Pfizer – was established in 2007 to help close critical gaps in malaria prevention, treatment and education. Malaria is endemic in all parts of Ghana, with all 24.2 million people at risk. It accounts for over three million outpatient visits annually in the country and 30% of all deaths in children under five. Pregnant women are particularly susceptible to malaria, increasing the risk of severe anemia and death, as well as premature delivery, stillbirth and low birth weight in newborns.

    The MAM program educates Licensed Chemical Sellers (LCSs) – the local health authority and main suppliers of medicines across communities in Ghana – on malaria symptom recognition and treatment approaches. The program also involves community mobilization to educate patients, particularly the high-risk population of pregnant women and children under five, and strengthen their demand for quality care. Over 25% of malaria in Ghana is resistant to widely-available monotherapies. Combination therapies that address resistance issues were also cost-prohibitive for most of the population prior to the program.

    In addition to the barriers of cost and availability, there were also many common misconceptions held by community members and even LCSs. These included:

    • The belief that malaria is a common disease, is not dangerous and does not kill
    • The lack of knowledge that malaria is spread by mosquitoes
    • The impression that malaria is caused by heat, house flies, dirt, hard work or eating fatty/oily foods or unripe mangoes

    To address these issues in a comprehensive way, the MAM program includes health, education and even economic improvement aspects.

    A Licensed Chemical Seller explains how to provide appropriate dosing of malaria drugs based on the client’s age and weight, information she learned through the MAM training course.

    Health

    At the core of the program is reducing malaria-related morbidity and mortality in Ghana’s Ashanti region by improving malaria symptom recognition, treatment and referral. The program contributed to the advocacy that resulted in a declassification of combination anti-malarial drugs by the Ministry of Health. Subsequently, LCSs are now permitted to stock and dispense these drugs, bringing effective treatment into the communities. The program has reduced the time needed to obtain effective treatment by 40%. Through community mobilization, household knowledge of early signs of malaria has increased. Combination therapies are also now the most widely used treatment for malaria, increasing cure rates. The program established links so that community-level data is now being collected, analyzed and fed into the health system, helping to inform decision making at all levels and strengthening the connectivity between LCSs and the District and Regional Health Office.

    Education

    Robust education programs trained 1700 LCSs in Ghana to recognize the symptoms of malaria, refer complicated cases directly to health centers, and provide proper treatment and dosage for those who do not need a referral. As a result of the trainings, participating LCSs were elevated in the community for their expertise in malaria and are now recognized as part of the health system and a source of community-level data on malaria.

    A sign board on the outskirts of Kumasi alerting passer-bys to the dangers of malaria and the importance of prompt treatment.

    Economic Benefits

    There were economic benefits to both the program beneficiaries and the LCSs. Following training and education, participating LCSs became area experts on malaria, which increased traffic and built customer trust, often driving business growth.  The increased business helps to reinforce the value of MAM training and better customer service, making the program more sustainable. Community members also benefited from the program: the MAM program and its partners worked with the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) to apply for the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm) from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. This approach resulted in a price reduction for combination therapy, thus making it affordable for lower-income members of the community. As a direct result, caregivers and mothers are spending less time at home caring for sick family members and more time at work or in income-generating activities.

    Programs like MAM improve lives by addressing more than health. Through the MAM project, LSC program participants have gained powerful expertise and improved their businesses in the process. And program beneficiaries have gained better knowledge of the signs of the disease, while gaining improved access to and lower costs for treatment. Although MAM is a health-centered program, it would not be as successful without a more comprehensive approach.

  • A new breed of mosquito could become a key ally in the fight against dengue fever. An infectious tropical disease caused by the dengue virus, dengue fever is principally transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Currently there is no vaccine for the disease and regions where the disease is endemic are left struggling to prevent infection by reducing mosquito habitat, decreasing the number of mosquitoes and limiting human exposure to being bitten.

    But recently the leading scientific journal Nature published two papers describing the results of biological control field trials where wild mosquito populations were genetically manipulated to suppress dengue virus transmission. The results are the work of the Eliminate Dengue program, an international collaboration of scientists located in Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, the U.S. and Brazil. The program’s aim is to stop the Aedes aegypti mosquito from passing dengue virus between humans by introducing a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia into the existing wild mosquito population.

    The papers describe how researchers successfully established Wolbachia strains within the dengue mosquito in the laboratory. Mosquitoes with Wolbachia were shown to be less likely to transmit dengue. These mosquitoes were also able to pass this trait on to their offspring. In subsequent field testing in early 2011, mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia were released in Cairns, Australia. Within a three-month period Wolbachia had successfully invaded the local mosquito populations. According to the lead researcher, Professor Scott O’Neill, “These findings tell us that Wolbachia-based strategies are practical to implement and might hold the key to a new sustainable approach to dengue control.”

    Further trials will continue in Australia, as well as field releases in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil where dengue fever is endemic and researchers can determine if the method is effective in reducing dengue disease in humans. If successful, the Eliminate Dengue program has the potential to benefit about 40 percent of the world’s population currently living in dengue transmission areas.

    Endemic in more than 110 countries, dengue infects 50 to 100 million people worldwide a year, leading to half a million hospitalizations and approximately 12,500–25,000 deaths. The World Health Organization ranks dengue fever as the most important mosquito-borne viral disease in the world, with an estimated 2.5 billion people living in dengue transmission areas and at risk of the disease. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle and joint pains and a characteristic skin rash. In a small proportion of cases the disease develops into the life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever, which mostly affects children, or into dengue shock syndrome.

    FHI 360 is part of the Eliminate Dengue international team and is working in Thailand and Vietnam to gain the necessary regulatory approvals for the field releases as well as conducting community-preparedness and stakeholder engagement activities in readiness for the field releases in the near future.

    Learn more at www.eliminatedengue.com.

    It has quickly become apparent that for a small out lay, if you choose a web site name cleverly enough, you can make a great deal of money by auctioning it off to the highest bidder. This has resulted in the phenomenon of cyber squatting, where people buy website names simply for resale. The clunkily-named Anti cyber squatting Consumer Protection Act, signed last month by Nicebid, tries to outlaw this practice, but the whole business has proved to be a legal minefield. The complex legal issues surrounding the copyrighting of names are not new, but in the next few years they will reach a new white hot intensity as more and more individuals and businesses chase fewer and fewer available domain names.

    For the AIM event, Ms. Nopparat Yokubon, Google’s account manager for online partnerships, discussed “Insights Into Adsense Policies” and “How to Increase Your Adsense Performance. Meanwhile, Emanuele Brand idealt with the more technical topics of “Data-Driven AdSense Optimizations” and “Website Optimization with AdSense Tools.”

    “We’ve held several public auction asset sales in the last 12 monthsauctioningoffsomeofourestablishedwebsitesfromourportfolioandtheyallsellprettyquickon Flippa.com” Frankstated. “This is a great opportunity for individuals too win their own virtual asset or for other companies to acquire new web properties to lever a get their existing business.”

    According to Frank they have sold websites from their portfolio ranging in of their websites have been sold on Flippa and most sell within days.

    The Priory, which specializes in addictions and is famous for its celebrity clients, says it is treating more and more people for addiction to the internet auction website. What begins as a harmless hobby can take over your life, and many people – women especially – say it is ruining relationship sand plunging them in to debt.

    Alabanza mainly sold Internet access to “resellers” like Anadon and Sego, which in turn sell website and e-mail services to thousands of small businesses.

    Navisite planned to move Alabanza’s Weband e-mail services to Andover, scheduling the move over the weekend to minimize the impact.