Knowledge is the enemy of disease. That is a powerful metaphor. Applying what we know already will have a bigger impact on health and disease than any drug or technology likely to be introduced in the next decade. But if disease is to be defeated, in addition to the undeniable need for new knowledge, existing knowledge must be applied in ways that will improve health care, especially in underprivileged populations. There are huge gaps in knowledge application, and a link is needed between knowledge and effective decision-making and health-policy development: appropriate resources are needed to construct such a link. - The Lancet
There is no dispute about the role of health knowledge in the prevention of diseases and child survival.
"We find that parents' education and a mother's propensity to seek out modern healthcare are empirically important when explaining child survival, while the prevalence of common diseases, along with infrastructure such as improved water and sanitation, are not." and "actions taken by parents to help sick children are the most important factors .... "
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"It is tragic that so many children continue to die unnecessarily for want of simple, low-cost interventions that are often locally available. It is even more tragic that many of these children would have been saved if only their mothers, fathers, family caregivers and, indeed, health workers, had basic healthcare knowledge to recognise serious illness requiring urgent, appropriate, life-saving action."
Neil Pakenham-Walsh - Coordinator, HIFA2015 - Co-Director, Global Healthcare Information Network
The uncomfortable reality is that we live in a world where there is a Silent emergency every day: 22,000 children will die from preventable causes today. 1,000 women will die from pregnancy-related causes today. This year, 4 million newborns worldwide will die in the first month of life.
The silent killers that will take away their lives are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and related causes. Almost 90% of all child deaths are attributable to just six conditions: neonatal causes, pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of excellent projects, aimed at these killers, are being implemented in both rural and urban parts of the world. Some serve a village, while others serve a group of villages, a town, a city, a taluka, a block or a district. Yet few projects are implemented state-wide and even fewer nationwide. Why is that? A key factor is capacity-building and scaling-up.
Health education has to be one of the most effective ways to reduce maternal and child mortality, those preventable deaths that we never seem to manage to prevent. We need to deliver vital messages and information for mothers, fathers, siblings, caregivers and communities to use in changing behaviour and practices: messages that can save and protect the lives of children and help them grow and develop to their full potential.
For the illiterate, currently their only source of information is probably going to be the people around them, who are also, in many cases, illiterate. Their level of dependency and lack of self-reliance, their dis-empowerment and exclusion, is at a level that many of us will find hard to imagine.
With the continuous rapid growth in population and shrinking budgets, governments are finding it increasingly difficult, and expensive, to effectively manage programmes and efforts that involve training and educating their large numbers of departments and staff. This is leaving health workers, and by extension, families and communities ignorant of the basic knowledge that could help prevent diseases and improve the quality of health of their families and communities. The more that resources can be freed up to facilitate the flow of knowledge directly the better.
The First Mile Now Reachable
The mobile phone has made connection possible in ways that were truly unthinkable until very recently. And it has stoked the desire of people to be connected. Take India for example: with a population of 1.17 billion and a wireless user base of about 700 million (Oct. 2010), and growing at the rate of 15 to 20 million a month. "Cell Phone penetration will reach 97% by 2014", according to a recent study. Soon, almost everybody will have one.
This is a game-changer for capacity-building and scaling up. It means we can reach the excluded, the illiterate, all those women, men and children who were only visible in tragic statistics. We can reach families and communities as a whole - something we've never really been able to do before.
Empowering, Teaching, Reaching and Changing Behaviours
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.
While many successful projects have been developed to use mobile phones in various settings to transmit messages – encouraging people to come to health centres for check ups, reminders to take medication, and public health campaigns – the HealthPhone™ is an innovative leap forward. HealthPhone™ provides families with their own personal reference library and guide to better health practices. Available in real time, right to those who need it, when they need it and when a health problem is about to strike, where they are, and as they are.
Diarrhoea
When a child has diarrhoea, the video clip about how to mix a simple oral rehydration solution (ORS) can mean the difference between the child living and dying. Diarrhoea kills an estimated 1.5 million children each year. Inexpensive and effective treatments for diarrhoea exist, but in developing countries only 39 per cent of children with diarrhoea receive the recommended treatment. Use of ORS has been shown to decrease millions of deaths from dehydration caused by diarrhoea.
Malaria
When the malaria season approaches, the video clip about bed nets and how to deal with fevers can help prevent the death of children and prevent complications in women who are pregnant. One million deaths a year – most of them children under five in Africa, can be prevented as the result of using mosquito nets and appropriate diagnosis and treatment of fevers. In fact, on average a child in Africa dies every 30 seconds from a malaria infection caused by the bite of a mosquito.
Pneumonia
When persistent coughs and colds are disrupting children's sleep, the video clip and audio information will provide a step by step guide on what to check for, how to treat and how to ensure that a serious case of pneumonia does not set in. Pneumonia is the biggest cause of child deaths in the world, killing 1.8 million children under five years of age every year, more than 98% of which occur in 68 developing countries. Early intervention to treat coughs can lead to decrease in cases of pneumonia among children, preventing millions of deaths a year.
Preloaded Content on Low-Cost Mobile Phones and on the Cloud!
HealthPhone™'s health and nutrition content is scripted on knowledge prepared jointly by UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNDP, UNAIDS, WFP and The World Bank. It addresses the main areas of concern; Timing Births, Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health, Child Development and Early Learning, Breastfeeding, Nutrition and Growth, Immunization, Diarrhoea, Coughs Colds and More Serious Illnesses, Hygiene, Malaria, HIV, Child Protection, Injury Prevention, Emergencies: preparedness and response. This content will be pre-loaded on popular low-cost models of mobile phones – no signal is required, nor cost to download videos and other media. Users choose what they want to watch and listen to and when, wherever they happen to be.
Pilot content in English and 15 Indian Languages: Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
HealthPhone™ is coming soon to a village, town, city, slum, block, district, state, province, country near you!
'Over the last one hundred years, the health of the World's population has improved far more than it did in all of the previous natural history of mankind. Global average life expectancy increased from around 31 years in 1900 to 66 by 2000.' (Maddison, 2001)
'Why do over 20% of children die in some poor countries, while in others only 2% die? We examine this question using survey data covering 278,000 children in 45 low-income countries. We find that parents' education and a mother's propensity to seek out modern healthcare are empirically important when explaining child survival, while the prevalence of common diseases, along with infrastructure such as improved water and sanitation, are not. Using a GINI coefficient we construct for treatment services, we find that public and private health systems are 'equally unequal', that is, both tend to favor children in relatively well-off households, and neither appears superior at improving outcomes in very poor communities. These facts contrast with a common view that a much-expanded public health sector is necessary to reduce child mortality. Instead, we believe the empirical evidence points to the essential role of parents as advocates for their child's health. If we can provide better health knowledge and general education to parents, a private healthcare sector can arise to meet demand. We provide evidence that this alternative route to low mortality is indeed a reason behind the current success of many countries with low child mortality, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, and the Indian state of Kerala. Finally, we calculate a realistic package of interventions that target education, health knowledge and treatment seeking could reduce child mortality by 32%.'
"actions taken by parents to help sick children are the most important factors determining cross country differences in child survival"
Health Information For All by 2015
Every day, tens of thousands of children, women and men die needlessly for want of simple, low-cost interventions – interventions that are often already locally available. A major contributing factor is that the mother, family caregiver or health worker does not have access to the information and knowledge they need, when they need it, to make appropriate decisions and save lives.
HIFA2015 is a campaign and knowledge network with more than 4000 members representing 1800 organisations in 157 countries worldwide. Members include health workers, publishers, librarians, information technologists, researchers, social scientists, journalists, policy-makers and others – all working together towards the HIFA2015 goal.
Translators Without Borders -
The work of Translators without Borders is of crucial importance for the success of humanitarian projects. Information available in the local language is much more effective than in a foreign language. This is true for engineering and construction projects (such as digging water wells), and agricultural projects (such as how to irrigate the land). But it is particularly important in healthcare. In many areas in the world people do not only die from diseases, but also from the fact that they do not have basic information about how to stay healthy and what to do to prevent disease.
If you are a translator and you are willing to donate your time and professional skills to Translators without Borders, you will directly support humanitarian projects. To join TWB, we ask you to fill in the translator application form.
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Watch the TEDx Talk - HealthPhone™: The First Mile Now Reachable
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