Tag Archives: Africa

Dr. Livingstone, I…

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Livingstone, Zambia for the ONE Campaign

Don’t email me. It’s Livingstone with an “e.” And the guy who found Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 was Henry Stanley from the New York Herald.

We are ending our week-long visit to Africa here, having spent the last two days in the Zambian capital of Lusaka.

One of the places we visited was the U.S. embassy where we chatted with Ambassador Mark Storella. He has been very active in his nearly three years here in the area of health care generally and HIV/AIDS in particular. Continue reading →

ONE Campaign Doing Good in Ghana

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The reason I came to Ghana was to help publicize the introduction of two vaccines to the Ghanaian heath care system: a rotaviral vaccine and a pneumococcal vaccine for newborns.

These vaccines will help stave off infant diarrhea and pneumonia which kill more children under the age of five than malaria and tuberculosis combined.

A quick geography lesson: Ghana is located on the western coast of Africa, sort of. According to the CIA World Factbook it has a population of a little over 25 million of whom nearly 70 percent are Christian. The country is slightly smaller than Oregon.

This is sub-Saharan Africa, located just eight degrees north of the equator, so it is hot just about all the time. The temps have been in the high 80’s every day with a “feels like” temperature of about 104 because of the humidity. This is the beginning of the rainy season but we had only one rain storm, which was a dandy, and it passed in about an hour. Continue reading →