Word: africas
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...hard to grasp the impact diarrhea has on people's lives across Africa and Asia. The disease kills more children than either malaria or AIDS, stunts growth, and forces millions - adults and children alike - to spend weeks at a time off work or school, which hits both a country's economy and its citizens' chances of a better future. In countless villages like Sogola, where people have long drawn water from unreliable wells, diarrhea kills so many that there is a general sense of resignation, as if watching children die is simply one of life's inevitable tragedies. One morning...
...under way. Over the past few years, a handful of aid organizations and governments - including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development - have begun distributing zinc supplements to villagers in Bangladesh, India, Mali and Pakistan. Several other groups are working with governments in Africa to introduce zinc, which comes both in tablet form and as a syrup. In Mali, Save the Children U.S. used $680,000 from a 2007 charity concert of American Idol to distribute zinc tablets to a handful of villages in the south of the country. (Read TIME's Persons...
...Diarrhea has been ignored for decades. For many people outside Africa, the continent's calamitous health problems are largely defined by two epidemics: AIDS and malaria. There is a World AIDS Day and a World Malaria Day, and countless medical researchers work to combat the two diseases. In 2008 about 60% of the world's funding for research into major epidemics went to AIDS and malaria; diarrhea received a tiny fraction in comparison. Just 4% of all U.S. funding for research into major developing-world epidemics in 2007 went to diarrhea. The European Commission has given about $1.33 billion...
...main treatment - in many places the only treatment - since the early 1970s, when U.N. officials first distributed sachets of sugar and salt to refugees in South Asia in an attempt to reduce cholera deaths. Today rehydration salts mixed with clean water are given to millions of poor across Africa and Asia. It works: the glucose in the water slows the exit of fluids from the body, allowing electrolytes to be absorbed through the intestinal walls and thus halting potentially deadly dehydration. (See pictures of the politics of water in Central Asia...
...Within a few years of People Power in the Philippines, it was hard to keep up with all the peaceful uprisings that were sweeping aside authoritarian regimes across the globe: Solidarity in Poland, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the end of dictatorships in South Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan. Even the extinguished idealism of student protesters in Tiananmen or the monks in Burma drew succor from the example of a certain Filipino homemaker's bravery - a woman who herself almost inadvertently assumed the mantle of Mohandas Gandhi after the assassination of her political-dissident husband...