Nearly 3,000 kids die every day in Africa from malaria. According to the World Health Organization, transmission of the disease would be reduced by 60% with the use of mosquito nets and prompt treatment for the infected. 3,000 kids is a 9/11 every day.
The nets are coated with an insecticide and cost between $4 and $6. You need about $10 to get them shipped and installed. Some nets can cover a family of four. They also last four years. For $10 that means a kid gets to live. Make it $20 and even more kids are saved. Please consider making a donation to this website UNFoundation.org/malaria. All it takes is a simple $20 and a kid's life is saved.
Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated has donated $20,000 to the foundation because he calculated that he has said the word 'net' 20,000 times total in all of his publications. Together we can raise $1 million and save 50 times the population of Nett Lake, Minnesota.
How much of that $1 million goes towards the nets?
well, all of it. That's because thanks to Ted Turner, who donated $1 billion to create the UN Foundation, which covers all overhead costs, every cent goes to nets. Bill and Melinda Gates have single-handedly finished covering every bed of Zambia. The UN Foundation is not asking for people to invest money into a scientist looking for a cure, and there are no worries about warlords hijacking a truckload of nets.
According to Andrea Gay, the UN Foundation's Director of Children's Health, "Theoretically if every person in Africa slept under a net, nobody need ever die of malaria again."
That's a serious return on profits. Think about it $20 is not a big price to pay, and it gurantees that someone gets to live, and an instant return on your investment. Those odds are better than money invested in the stock market.
(almost all of this post was generated with the help of Rick Reilly's SI article about the dangers of malaria)
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