The Need for Nets
Maital and Adam Baldachin are in the middle of a year of service in Mbale, Uganda. Maital is there on the Princeton University Labouisse Fellowship to expand a library that she began in the summer of 2005 and Adam is traveling as an American Jewish World Service fellow and the Masort Olami Representative. They can be reached by visiting their blog. For the past three months, we have had to make sure that our net is tucked between the bed frame and the mattress before we go to sleep. We moved to Uganda in July and every night since we have slept under a mosquito net. Uganda has a very high prevalence of malaria and having seen friends suffer from the disease as well as the side effects of the treatment, we will do what we can to avoid contracting it. One relatively simple measure is to sleep under a insecticide treated net not only because they keep out the mosquitoes but because they kill them as well. We also appreciate the net for all of the other things it keeps out of our bed.
Sleeping under a net is a big deal here. Just the other week during a walk through the village, one of our tour guides, the local pastor and also trained community health worker, proudly pointed out the nets that he had distributed to the poorest in the community. We entered people’s mud huts with grass thatched roofs and noticed that even over beds where five family members slept hung a mosquito net. Also, for a few weeks, the government newspaper ran a cartoon emphasizing the importance of sleeping under insecticide-treated nets.
The people in our community often talk of the fact that nets not only reduce the incidence of malaria to those who sleep underneath them, but to the community at large. For anyone who has suffered from malaria or worse seen someone die because of it, sleeping under a mosquito net is definitely worthwhile!
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Today the World Health Organization came out with data which
suggests the remarkable effectiveness of nets. Follow the coverage at Washington
Post or New
York Times.
Want to help?
Learn more about the program at www.urj.org/nets.