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.
Due to dramatic advances in transportation, a viral outbreak that began halfway around the world now assaults our entire country. It is sickening and killing even people in small towns like Odon, Indiana. That’s where my 91-year-old brother is confined to a small room in an assisted living facility. He’s recuperating from hip surgery and isolated to hopefully avoid contracting the deadly virus.
How we treat ourselves, our animals and our planet is a matter of life or death. Earth Day 2020 reminds us to address climate change in terms of One Health — the intersection of human, animal and environmental health. The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us that we must be responsible for each other — everywhere.
As the spread of the new coronavirus headlines the news this month, February is also a busy month for health observances. WiRED International provides training modules and, in some cases, special series for February health occasions. Some of these relevant modules have been translated into languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
On February 2 WiRED International – Armenia hosted a seminar on diabetes at the Tatev Tourism Information Center in the rural village of Tatev, Armenia. Avetisyan Jaklin, a Tatev Medical Center doctor, led the two-and-a-half hour interactive session using the Armenian language version of WiRED’s Diabetes Series. The 12 participants included nurses and doctors together with several people with diabetes.
On January 21, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a list of ten threats (see sidebar) impacting global health, which WHO and its partners will focus on in 2019. According to WHO, “The world is facing multiple health challenges. These range from outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and diphtheria, increasing reports of drug-resistant pathogens, growing rates of obesity and physical inactivity to the health impacts of environmental pollution and climate change and multiple humanitarian crises.”