Word: zinc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thanks to a quiet revolution under way, young victims like Suleiman need not perish. Over the past few years, several aid organizations and governments--including the 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...
...There are still hurdles. In Mali, where more than one in five 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...
...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...
...doesn't have to go far to find that. In Morola, a village of some 500 people nestled among mango trees near the Guinea border, locals say that diarrhea deaths have fallen sharply since zinc tablets were distributed last year. When I visited in May, the village chief gathered five women together to talk about their lives. The group had lost seven children between them, four to diarrhea. Kinza Diallo, 29, says that when her 1-year-old daughter contracted diarrhea in 2004, she clutched her on the back of a motorbike for the hour's ride to the nearest...
...pictures of of how zinc is saving lives in Mali...