Health and medicine

Health and medicine are fundamental topics for children and families. Materials available from the UN and World Health Organization and similar aid organizations are often written for trained workers or local health staff.

• Preventative Hygiene (i.e., hand washing, sneezing on elbows, cleaning cuts and scrapes, importance of clean water, how diseases spread and how to stop their spread).
  • WaterLeaders Foundation video on safe water generation: "Safe Drinking Water is Essential." WaterLeaders is actively engaged in field-level safe water projects, but has found more impact through educational and awareness activities surrounding the issues and available solutions to combat the world water crisis. To these ends, we have provided a grant to the National Academies of Science to create a web-based and DVD-based virtual exhibit titled "Safe Drinking Water Is Essential." It provides a wonderful overview of drinking water issues focused on the source, treatment and distribution and highlights available solutions now. Furthermore, we will be producing it in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Mandarin and it will be ready to go later this summer. Since we have partnered with the NAS, the final product has really turned out to be a purely educational initiative, not your typical NGO-promotional piece. So I believe it fits in the OLPC philosophy, mission and objectives. Robert Steiner, Executive Director.
• First-Aid
  • For example, see "First Aid for Children Fast", Johns Hopkins Children's Center. ISBN 0789489600
• Availability of Doctors
  • When to see a doctor; when you can treat yourself.
  • Treatments that don't need a doctor. See "Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Healthcare Handbook", Werner, Thuman, and Maxwell. ISBN 0942364155
• Sexual health information & HIV/AIDS prevention.
  • Collaboration with international AIDS organizations is recommended for material targeted at older children. Possible partners include the Nkosi Johnson AIDS Foundation in South Africa.
  • The program 'the World starts with me' is a complete digital curriculum on sexual health and hiv/aids prevention. It was developed for Uganda and is currently being adapted for other countries. see: http://www.butterfly-works.org
• Nutrition.
• Links to authoritative healthcare information.

Current projects

UNICEF is developing water and sanitation material for children for the XOs; both warnings and advisories, tools for making targeted version of the same, and overviews of good practices and potential risks.

See also

• Vision screening

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