WiRED International promotes community health by stressing the prevention of illness. Until there is a vaccine to help prevent coronavirus, wearing a mask or face covering is one of the best ways to protect yourself and your family.
WiRED International’s community health workers (CHWs) in Kisumu, Kenya, continue to be a beacon for their communities, providing guidance, information and support for health issues. Their work is particularly important in these pandemic times, as they provide health surveillance for other illnesses such as pneumonia and cholera which could be overlooked without their monitoring. From September 1 to September 27, 14 CHWs reached 6,679 people with health services on topics such as malnutrition, hypertension, pneumonia and HIV/AIDS.
WiRED International’s Community Health Workers (CHWs) in Kisumu, Kenya, continue to play an essential role in community education, providing advice on health issues as well as necessary referrals. In the final week of August, 14 CHWs reached 1,686 people, covering topics such as unsafe drinking water, COVID-19 and teenage pregnancy.
Graduates of WiRED International’s Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program in Kisumu, Kenya, continue to play an essential role in improving the lives of those in surrounding communities. Since mid-July, 13 CHWs reached 3,360 people and covered health issues as diverse as nutrition and handwashing while also dispelling notions of how COVID-19 is spread.
During the COVID-19 crisis, when life can feel stressful and out of control, you have the power to protect yourself, your family and your community from some of the worst diseases on the planet.
As the world waits for a COVID-19 vaccine, it is important to remember that vaccinations can prevent more than 20 other life-threatening diseases such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, cancers caused by HPV, pneumonia, meningitis, shingles and more.
In low-resource communities around the world, people often are unsure about basic health practices, such as proper handwashing techniques and safe food preparation, much less how to protect themselves from COVID-19.
WiRED International brought our Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program to Kisumu, Kenya earlier this year, and since then graduates of the month-long course are tending to the health of the populations they serve.
As much as we continue to learn about COVID-19, there is much we still don’t know.
Government guidance can be inaccurate, indecisive and even political, while the epidemiologists, scientists and world health agencies continue their research to nail down the transmission risks and prevention measures.
WiRED International staff writers Olivia and Meghan Spirito sat down with their parents, Christopher and Jennifer, during a family dinner to discuss how COVID-19 is affecting their lives and to share their thoughts on volunteering for WiRED. The sisters came up with questions before dinner to ask each other and their parents. They recorded their answers during the dinner and then wrote the conversation down for this article.
Myths about COVID-19 continue to circulate around the Internet. Misinformation ranges from the laughable (the virus arrived from outer space!) to the dangerous (hydroxychloroquine or bleach cure the virus). Conspiracy theories suggest that Greta Thunberg caused COVID-19 to help with climate change or that hand sanitizer companies invented the virus as a marketing scheme.
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic to Kisumu, Kenya, is placing a heavy burden on a population already suffering routinely from disease and lack of basic health care. If that weren’t enough, since early 2020, East Africa has experienced unprecedented waves of locust swarms — a crisis linked to climate change — which has destroyed livestock and crops and threatens to worsen food scarcity.