World Malaria Day
- By Richard Branson -
- Apr 25, 2012
I'm on my way to Washington for an event on impact investing with Hillary Clinton and have been looking at a note about today also being World Malaria Day.
Ending malaria would be a profound "impact investment" in human capital, especially in Africa where the disease wreaks havoc. Most of the 200 million people afflicted with malaria - which kills 600,000 every year - are on the African continent.
It just takes a single mosquito bite to spread malaria, but the World Health Organization and others are making huge progress with simple interventions like treated bed nets.
We are running this video about fighting malaria on Virgin Produced’s inflight channel on Virgin America and elsewhere: it highlights nothingbutnets.net, a UN Foundation and private sector initiative to help end malaria by 2015.
So far, they've sent around six million insecticide-treated nets to people at risk. Malaria kills a child every 60 seconds, and a $10 bed net vastly reduces the risk of any child getting that fatal mosquito bite.
By Richard Branson. Founder of Virgin Group
