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There are quite a few informational videos that highlight the successes within the different Millennium Village sites.  One of the videos highlights not only the partnerships that the mHealth project has initiated, but also the benefits that have resulted from the use of mobile phones within the health sector.  Please check it out and share your thoughts!

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In a recent article in the Scientific American entitled, “Expert Systems Fight Poverty“, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, wrote about how appropriate information communication technology paired with community involvement can save lives.  In the article, Sachs mentions how mobile phones are being used in Ghana to coordinate teams of ambulance drivers, midwifes and CHWs to refer emergency pregnancies and save lives.   He then goes on to talk about how ChildCount+ along with rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are being used in Kenya to improve home based treatment of Malaria by CHWs.

In the Kenyan village of Sauri, also part of the Millennium Village Project, CHWs are pioneering the application of expert systems for malaria control. In the past, suspected malaria patients had to walk or be carried to a clinic, often miles away, have a blood smear read under a microscope by a trained technician and, if positive, receive a prescription. With clinics few and far between and with trained technicians and microscopes even scarcer, untreated, lethal malaria ran rampant.

In the new approach, CHWs visit households on the lookout for fevers that may signify malaria. They carry rapid diagnostic tests that examine a drop of blood for the presence of the malaria pathogen. Then they send an SMS (short service message) text with the patient’s ID and the test results. Seconds later an automated text response informs the health worker of the proper course of treatment, if any. The system can also send reminders about any follow-up treatments or scheduled clinic visits for the patient. The new system of malaria control includes insecticide-treated bed nets made to last for five years and a new generation of combination drugs based on a traditional Chinese herbal treatment, artemisinin.

This full set of tools constitutes a remarkably effective malaria-control system. Already a partial deployment of the system is reducing the malaria burden dramatically in several parts of Africa. Modest international financial support could greatly accelerate the deployment of the full system, and if it were scaled up throughout Africa, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved annually at around $7 per person a year in the malaria-transmission zones.

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Credit: James Hill for the New York Times

From March 9th, 2010 New York Times article by Jeffrey Gettleman: “Shower of Aid Brings Flood of Progress“.

His (Jeffrey Sachs) intent was to show that tightly focused, technology-based and relatively straightforward programs on a number of fronts simultaneously — health care, education, job training — could rapidly lift people out of poverty.

In Sauri, at least, it seems to be working. Some of the goals were literally low-hanging fruit, like teaching banana farmers to rotate their crops. Other programs were more sophisticated, like the battle against malaria, which employs cutting-edge mobile technology against a disease that kills more than one million children each year.

The other day, a community health team in Sauri stooped through the doorway of a home of several sick children, said hello to Grandma and got to work. Within minutes, a health worker had pricked a child, sent a text message with the blood results by cellphone to a computer server overseen by a man named Dixon in a town about an hour away and gotten back these instructions: “Child 81665 OKOTH Patrick m/16m has MALARIA. Please provide 1 tab of Coartem (Act) twice a day for three days.”

These small miracles are happening every day now in Sauri, population 65,000.

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