Word: mali
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...during a heavy rainstorm a few years ago. The 2-year-old suddenly stopped eating and then developed severe diarrhea, which continued for days, draining him of energy. On the third day, Suleiman's mother Aiseta Traoré carried his listless body to the road outside their village in southern Mali and hitchhiked to the nearest hospital, about 9 miles away. There, she says, a doctor gave her a pack of vitamins and advised her to take the boy home to recover. Hours after Traoré and Suleiman reached their village, though, the boy died...
...Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development--have begun distributing zinc supplements to villagers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. A number of 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 American Idol charity concert to distribute zinc tablets to a handful of villages in the south of the country...
There are still hurdles. In Mali, where more than 20% of children never see their fifth birthday, the government has finally added zinc to its annual list of 100 essential drugs, clearing the way for much wider distribution of the tablets. But only a few villages have received zinc tablets so far--and those have all come through the Save the Children U.S. program, whose funding expires next year, according to Tom McCormack, the organization's representative in Mali. Even though it has virtually no money to train health workers, Mali's government remains deeply reluctant to allow uneducated villagers...
...their part, government officials say Mali's chronic shortage of skills severely hampers efforts to launch new programs. "Mali is vast, and the level of knowledge is basic," says Adama Diawara, a ranking official at the Ministry of Health, adding that before approving zinc, "we needed evidence that it worked...
Looks like V's not getting an invite to the "[Mali]bu" anytime soon...