As WiRED looks forward to a busy new year, it seems a good time to reflect on our work in 2012 and share some plans for exciting new projects that will expand our reach in war-torn and developing communities worldwide.

Three new Community Health Information (CHI) centers are now up and running in Quilalí and Chinandega, Nicaragua, and Marcovia, Honduras. Upgraded CHI libraries are also installed in Kisumu, Kenya.

WiRED International is partnering with a team of physicians in Australia to create a project with potential for global medical benefits. Funded by the Medtronic Foundation, this series will train doctors and nurses around the world.

Most children in the United States and other Western countries are screened for congenital heart defects when they are born and during their first year of life. Once detected, these heart defects can often be corrected, and the children go on to lead normal, healthy lives.

Carolyn Wallin and Veronica Ades have never met, but both women recently took the same innovative action to save lives in Africa: They personally delivered donated laptops and WiRED Community Health Information (CHI) e-libraries to medical professionals in developing regions of Tanzania and Uganda.

Remember the time you had strep throat as a kid? How much your throat hurt, how you had to go to the doctor and take medicine for over a week and stay home from school until you were better? That was no fun, to be sure, but if that’s what happened to you when you caught strep throat as a child, you can consider yourself very fortunate. In the United States, strep throat is treated, and that’s the end of the story.

WiRED International’s Honorary Board is an interdisciplinary group of extraordinary individuals who are committed to our mission of sharing critical medical information with impoverished communities worldwide.

WiRED’s next stop along the Amazon headwaters is Santa Maria de Nieva, Peru, where we will continue the work begun in the region last November. Santa Maria de Nieva is a small village, literally at the end of a road that wends through the jungles of northern Peru.

WiRED believes that community health starts with knowledge—and there is no better proof of this than the launch of WiRED’s Community Health Information Center (CHIC) Certificate Program in Kisumu, Kenya.

The success of WiRED International’s second trip to the isolated Peruvian village of Galilea rests solidly on our team of 14 volunteer translators. These men and women translated 25 of WiRED’s Community Health Information (CHI) program modules into Spanish, a task that took several months of dedicated, unpaid work.