END Fund [to 19 March 2016]
http://www.end.org/news
Press Releases and Major Announcements

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World’s Most Dangerous Journey: The Fecal-Oral Route
Mar 17, 2016
By: Warren Lancaster, Senior Vice President, Programs
The fecal oral route, not a journey to read about over a meal time, not romantic like stories of the ancient silk route, and not spectacular like driving along the Amalfi Coast of Italy. But it is a route taken every day by pathogens affecting millions of children from very low-income families. It’s the route followed by germs that are passed when people defecate in the open. The fecal matter is touched and contaminates food and water that is then ingested by other people.

Every year more than 700,000 children die from diarrhea. Millions more contract intestinal worms that cause poor health especially in school children. Yet washing hands with soap (the optimal word is soap) can interrupt this route, place a roadblock stopping the transmission of infection.

My work is to fight intestinal worms in children, to offer a parasite- free childhood. These worms are both vulnerable and resilient. Individually they can be killed by a very simply administered dose of deworming medicine once a year. But as a species, they are resilient because they survive in unhygienic environments and re-infect the same children within months. So we treat annually, children by the millions – to me a fantastic and valuable end in itself when I don’t have the resources to tackle the fecal oral route or the even wider geographical environment from which the disease caused by worms gets its name, geohelmithiasis.

But at the beginning of 2014, thanks to the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the END Fund had the opportunity to invest funds in a program to, in addition to treatment, provide hand washing facilities and tools to help clean the environment and dig pit latrines in 2,317 schools in three provinces in Angola. It seems a bit strange to try and communicate the excitement a development practitioner like me has when offered such an opportunity…