White House increases support for malaria fight
[ 2006-12-20 10:00 ]
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
The Bush administration has announced a new program to
support local efforts to control malaria
in Africa. Laura Bush said thirty million dollars will go to
African and American nongovernmental organizations, as well as civic and
religious groups.
The first lady announced the Malaria Communities Program at a White House
conference last Thursday. The one-day White House Summit on Malaria was the
first of its kind. It was organized to educate Americans about malaria and to
give new life to a worldwide campaign to end the disease.
The conference included nonprofit groups, international health experts and
African civic leaders. Among other things, they discussed an effort to get
millions of chemically treated mosquito nets to Africans. That campaign is led
by a new group called Malaria No More.
Also, President Bush will declare April 25 of next year Malaria
Awareness Day, as observed by other nations. And he announced he will add eight
countries to a year-old program, the President's Malaria Initiative. They
include Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya, along with Liberia, Madagascar, Mali
and Zambia.
The initiative calls for spending more than one thousand million dollars over
five years on fifteen African countries. The goal is to cut their
malaria-related deaths by fifty percent.
President Bush says the plan has already helped six million people in
Tanzania, Angola and Uganda. Other targeted countries are Malawi, Mozambique,
Rwanda and Senegal.
Malaria kills more than one million people a year, mostly young children in
Africa.
The World Bank last week announced 180 million dollars
in interest-free loans to fight malaria in Nigeria. Africa's most populated
nation has 20 percent of the world's cases.
Earlier this month, a study in Science magazine showed how malaria and AIDS
help each other to spread. University of Washington scientists say malaria
temporarily increases virus levels in people with HIV. So they are more likely
to infect others. And because the AIDS virus weakens the body's defenses, the
victims are at higher risk from malaria.
And last week, the United States National Institutes of Health announced
another important finding about AIDS. Two studies in Africa showed that
circumcision can reduce a man's risk of getting HIV through heterosexual sex by
half. For more about this finding, and about malaria, go to
voaspecialenglish.com.
And that's the VOA Special English Development Report,
written by Jill Moss. I’m Steve Ember.
malaria :
痢疾
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