Faiths Act

Inspired by the documentary of a Brazilian artist who created works of art from recyclable materials found at a landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro, local artists have created works from medical recyclables here for a World Malaria Day fundraiser on Wednesday, April 25.

Atlanta’s World Malaria Day art auction is to be held in the Atrium of the Georgia Tech College of Management located at 800 West Peachtree St., beginning at 7 p.m.

MedShare, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Georgia Institute of Technology have joined together to support the auction, which seeks to raise enough funds to send two 40-square-foot containers of medical supplies to Sierra Leone that continues to suffer from a widespread presence of the disease.

The cost of sending a single container is $25,000, and MedShare estimates that the value of its contents amount to $150,000.

Since 1998, the nonprofit with its headquarters in Decatur has diverted more than $100 million of medical equipment and supplies to health facilities in developing countries that otherwise would have been thrown into landfills.

According to David Pass, MedShare’s chief advancement officer, all of the equipment and supplies that are sent overseas meet World Health Organization standards.

U.S. hospitals, however, may donate the material instead of throwing it away because it remained unused during certain procedures or has been replaced by more recent inventory.

MedShare made available to the local artists obsolete supplies so they could create artwork that would be auctioned off in hopes of raising funds for the anti-malaria supplies including insecticide treated bed nets to be sent to Sierra Leone.

UNICEF says that malaria is the leading cause of illness and death of children under 5 years old in Sierro Leone, and for a country of 5.9 million people there are only 102 doctors.

The Tony Blair Foundation, which is leading the World Malaria Day global initiative that is to be celebrated around the world Wednesday under the leadership of the former U.K. prime minister, uses existing faith networks and the presence of churches and mosques in Sierra Leone to distribute bed nets and to disseminate health messages to combat the disease.

The foundation has sent two members of its 'Faiths Act Fellows,' Clinton R. Fluker and Sana Rahim, to Atlanta to assist with the project...

 You can read this article in its entirety at GlobalAtlanta.com