• Malaria kills nearly 1 million people every year
• 86% of malaria cases occur in Africa, but it’s still a global problem affecting Asia and Latin America
• There is no vaccine for malaria.

You may have heard about Ashton Kutcher’s meteoric rise to Twitter fame on the promise that he’d ding dong ditch Ted Turner’s house (that’s ringing the doorbell and running away) if he got to a million followers before CNN a couple of weeks ago.

Luckily, he added a more substantial contribution to society a couple days after this promise. He pledged to donate 10,000 malaria nets to people in need if he “beat” CNN.

Here at the Red Cross, we distribute malaria nets even without the million Twitter followers (although we’d love for you to follow @RedCross – there’s good stuff there) and certainly without the ding dong ditching.

We’ve relied on your donations ($10 per bed net) to avert 289,000 malaria deaths since 2002.

In honor of World Malaria Day, here’s some info about our program and how you can help:

The most effective prevention is to sleep under an insecticide-treated bed net which protects people from getting bitten and kills mosquitoes.

The Red Cross is playing a major role not only by distributing mosquito nets but also by having trained volunteers to visit households who received a net to make sure community members know how to use it.

The American Red Cross supports these “Hang Up” and “Keep Up” campaigns in Haiti, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Uganda. We also support bed net distributions during measles vaccination campaigns, and after disasters, such as floods and cyclones, when flooding creates ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

As a result of Red Cross net distributions, since 2002 more than 289,000 malaria deaths have been averted, while 17.5 million people have been better protected.

Filed under: Holiday, International