Battling the Big Three

By Garrett Kenyon

Children International agencies are spread across four continents, so sponsored families live in a broad range of environments. Overcrowded urban slums in India and the Philippines may appear to have little in common with bucolic mountain villages in Honduras and Guatemala, but poor children in all these locations face the same dire health threats.

While CI agencies do address localized health threats – the sponsorship program is designed to fight the common causes of illnesses that go hand in hand with poverty nearly everywhere. The three biggest are parasites, malnutrition and acute respiratory infection.

1. Putting Parasites in their Place

Many sponsored families live in areas where indoor plumbing and running water are almost non-existent. Communities like these are often plagued by unsanitary conditions that can create perfect breeding grounds for parasites.

Contaminated wells, inadequate sanitation, rains that lead to flooding, parasite-infested soil where children play barefoot...these are just some of the ways parasites can spread through poor communities like wildfire, wreaking havoc on public health – especially among young children.

Parasites are extremely hard to eradicate completely from communities – but sponsorship shields children from their most harmful effects by:

• Teaching children and their families about proper sanitation and parasite prevention
• Giving sponsored children and youth access to medical care
• Conducting regular parasite tests in sponsored communities
• Supplying anti-parasite medication to infected children, siblings and caregivers
• Providing shoes to sponsored children and youth.

2. Making Malnutrition History

Over 50 percent of the world’s population – and most sponsored families – live on less than $2.50 a day. Many make due with far less. With wages this low, it can be almost impossible for single parents raising many children on their own to provide adequate diets for their families. To make matters worse, in many of these communities, fresh fruits and vegetables – precisely what children need to grow and develop – are too often replaced by empty-calorie foods like chips and candy, which are cheap and plentiful. Conditions like these put children in poor communities at serious risk for developing malnutrition – which is linked to approximately one-third of all child deaths.

CI has a comprehensive program for diagnosing and treating malnourished children that includes:

• Medical examinations upon enrollment, followed by annual medical exams through age 11
• Children diagnosed with moderate to severe malnutrition are enrolled in feeding programs where they get the calories and nutrients they need to recover
• Treatment by agency doctors for any additional illnesses caused by or contributing to malnutrition
• Nutrition workshops where parents learn which affordable and locally available foods contain the most nutrition, and how to prepare them in ways kids like
• Monitoring for progress in malnourished children – for as long as it takes them to recover.

3. Rapid Response to Respiratory Infection

Respiratory infections are the leading cause of death for children around the world, killing more young children than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Conditions associated with poverty like overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions exacerbate the effects of respiratory infections like pneumonia, making them lethal for young children.

Sponsorship fights the health threat of respiratory infections with:

• Annual medical checkups for sponsored children through the age of 11
• Access to medical professionals, curative treatments and medicine
• Health and nutrition information – including preventive measures that help lessen the risk of infections – passed on to children and parents at various health and nutrition workshops
• Caring adults to look out for a child’s health, including agency staff and volunteers.