The Green Planet Monitor - Edition # 11

What is health, anyway? … the absence of illness, for sure …. It’s also the result of having a home, being safe, fed and loved. Fran Lenhardt – of Newmarket Ontario – rediscovered this simple truth while visiting HIV-AIDS orphans in a town in the Kenyan Rift Valley, three and a half hours out of Nairobi, in east Africa. Back from her trip, Lenhardt now devotes all her spare time fundraising for the home and its 74 young residents. GPM producer Victoria Fenner brings us the story.

Thinking about the diseases that afflict humans the most … malaria actually kills more people than HIV. Upwards of a million die each year from the protozoal infection – mostly infants, small children and pregnant women. Awash Teklehaimanot is an Ethiopian with a long-time interest in this scourge. He worked for years with the World Health Organization’s Roll Back Malaria program, helping to coordinate malaria control work in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most prevalent. In 2000, he joined old colleague Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, teaching malaria epidemiology and helping to tackle the United Nations Millenium Development Goals regarding the Big Three: tuberculosis, malaria and HIV. GPM producer Dave Kattenburg spoke with Professor Awash Teklehaimanot in his office at Columbia University, in upper Manhattan.

And on the topic of malaria … Knowledge and a few practical measures can go a long way towards reducing the prevalence of this killer disease. An education group in the tiny west African nation of Gambia is promoting malaria awareness – aided by a few Nova Scotians. GPM producer Norma Jean MacPhee has more.