Community Health Worker Related

Smile Back at WIRED

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The summer is fast coming to a close, but you can help support WIRED International into the fall and beyond by signing up for AmazonSmile.

Buying through AmazonSmile costs you nothing more. By shopping through AmazonSmile, 0.5% of the price of your purchase will be donated directly to WIRED by Amazon. The percentage taken out of each purchase can go a long way in expanding WiRED’s work in low-resource areas of the world — especially through our Community Health Worker Program — as COVID-19 and other serious diseases continue to batter these underserved populations.

Community Health Worker Related

WIRED Community Health Workers Report from Kenya

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In low-resource communities around the world, people often are unsure about basic health practices, such as proper handwashing techniques and safe food preparation, much less how to protect themselves from COVID-19.

WiRED International brought our Community Health Worker (CHW) Training Program to Kisumu, Kenya earlier this year, and since then graduates of the month-long course are tending to the health of the populations they serve.

Global Health

COVID-19 and Airborne Transmission

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As much as we continue to learn about COVID-19, there is much we still don’t know.

Government guidance can be inaccurate, indecisive and even political, while the epidemiologists, scientists and world health agencies continue their research to nail down the transmission risks and prevention measures.

Global Health

Thoughts on Coping with the COVID-19 Crisis

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WiRED International staff writers Olivia and Meghan Spirito sat down with their parents, Christopher and Jennifer, during a family dinner to discuss how COVID-19 is affecting their lives and to share their thoughts on volunteering for WiRED. The sisters came up with questions before dinner to ask each other and their parents. They recorded their answers during the dinner and then wrote the conversation down for this article.

Climate Change

Climate Change Poses Pregnancy Risks

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COVID-19 has understandably preoccupied us for months, nevertheless many other critical threats have not taken a holiday. One threat — climate change — looms large, and will punish the earth long after the virus is off the front pages.

An exhaustive study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that pregnant women exposed to air pollution or high temperatures intensified by climate change risk preterm birth, low birth weight and stillbirth.

Community Health Worker Related

COVID-19 Myth Busters

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Myths about COVID-19 continue to circulate around the Internet. Misinformation ranges from the laughable (the virus arrived from outer space!) to the dangerous (hydroxychloroquine or bleach cure the virus). Conspiracy theories suggest that Greta Thunberg caused COVID-19 to help with climate change or that hand sanitizer companies invented the virus as a marketing scheme.

Climate Change

WiRED Team in Kenya Takes Action against COVID-19

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The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic to Kisumu, Kenya, is placing a heavy burden on a population already suffering routinely from disease and lack of basic health care. If that weren’t enough, since early 2020, East Africa has experienced unprecedented waves of locust swarms — a crisis linked to climate change — which has destroyed livestock and crops and threatens to worsen food scarcity.