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In South Africa, Using Mobile Technology to Improve Maternal Health Access
MAMA users in South Africa receive daily text messages filled with tips and reminders about the health of their babies. Photo by Imani M. Cheers/IRP.Memory Banda is busy. Her 10-month old son is teething and taking his first steps around her Hillbrow home, a revitalized neighborhood in Johannesburg's bustling city center.
"This is my first child so I didn't know what to do when his teeth started to show," she said. When Memory needed tips and advice about her son's teething process, she didn't need to go to her local clinic or call a doctor. Instead, she receives several text messages a week about her baby's development from the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action, affectionately known as MAMA -- a global movement that uses mobile technologies to improve the health and lives of mothers in developing nations.
According to UNICEF, 4,300 mothers die in South Africa every year due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth, 20,000 babies are stillborn and another 23,000 die in their first month of life. In total, 75,000 children do not make it to their fifth birthday.
South African women living in poverty face many challenges, specifically access to quality health care. In communities such as Hillbrow, there are high rates of unemployment, poverty and HIV prevalence is estimated at 30 percent among pregnant women. Despite these challenges, mobile technologies are providing women with access to life-saving maternal health information.
MAMA provides pregnant women and new mothers with vital information and support using their mobile phones, through five different channels, including an interactive website, text messages, social networking and voicemails. Women are charged one rand (about 10 cents) to sign up for the MAMA services.
MAMA Mobi -- the group's interactive website -- is also available to users with smartphone capabilities. Information based on specifics such as their baby's due date or age milestones are personalized for each user. MAMA SMS sends text messages and reminders to women in five different languages, including English, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans. MAMA Voice sends pre-recorded messages in the same languages as the text messages for users who face literacy challenges.
MAMA MXit takes advantage of the 10 million-plus users on MXit, a social networking site, and has established an educational portal for South African men and women between the ages of 18 to 25 years old with important information about pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.
MAMA South Africa faces many challenges, including literacy rates among users and he high cost of text messages. As a result of the high cost, MAMA is not currently offering nationwide text-based reminders, but the goal is to offer this to moms on a national basis in the near future. The text service will consist of a weekly message reminder from five weeks of pregnancy until a child is one year old.
In addition to encouraging and empowering mothers with stage-based health information, MAMA's mobile messages provide reminders for mothers to go to the clinic. For mothers living with HIV, MAMA provides messages on the importance of taking ARV (antiretroviral), breastfeeding, and getting their baby tested for HIV.
MAMA South Africa is ending the pilot phase of the program and working on gearing up to increase the scale and reach of the mobile service with a goal of reaching 500,000 mothers by 2015.
This story is part of a series of reports on the impact of mobile technology and health in 10 African countries. For more, visit The Cheers Report.
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In Senegal, a Campaign of Education and Dialogue on a Painful Rite of Passage
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JEFFREY BROWN: Next: abandoning a widespread and painful rite of passage.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro visited the West African nation of Senegal. His report is part of our Agents for Change series.
And a note: Some viewers may find the subject matter troubling.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As dusk approaches, a group called Tostan sets up a giant screen in this remote village in Senegal. To overcome language barriers, the feature will be a 1929 Buster Keaton silent film. The film is a hit, as were events put on earlier in the day by Tostan.
Its mission is to teach about human rights, specifically the right to health, but its seminars and skits will often lead to a discussion of an age-old custom: female genital cutting.
WOMAN: She needs to be cut. All girls need that. You can't have a recognized marriage if she's not cut.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This painful rite of passage is practiced by both Muslims and Christians across a swathe of mostly African nations, from Senegal to Egypt.
Each year, the World Health Organization says up to three million girls in Africa are subjected to genital mutilation, and up to 140 million women live with its consequences. Genital cutting probably originated in the harems of ancient rulers as a means of controlling women's fidelity, or a sign of chastity among those who aspired to be consorts, according to Molly Melching, who started Tostan.
MOLLY MELCHING, Founder, Tostan: As the years went on, I mean, 2,220 years, it became very much a part of what was considered criteria for good marriage.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Melching is an Illinois native who has lived here for about four decades, first as a student, then a Peace Corps worker.
Genital cutting was rarely discussed publicly, and in fact when she began Tostan 20 years ago, her goal wasn't to end it, but instead to simply provide information that was sorely lacking.
MOLLY MELCHING: When you see a friend that you've known for several months and you've gone to her house for lunch, and then she tells you her child has some problem, that it's someone who has cast an evil spell on the child, the baby, and that she's going to take them to a religious leader to get the spell taken off, and you don't know what to say, and it turns out the baby was dehydrated.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But the more Tostan's staff and volunteers talked to local communities about health, the more the topic Melching calls FGC came up, since people began to tie it to bad health.
MOLLY MELCHING: So, suddenly, as they started learning germ transmission and the consequences of FGC and how these infections occur and why they had more problems in childbirth than other women who have not been cut, they started saying, wait a minute.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: To go from talking about an age-old cultural norm to actually changing it presented a huge challenge. Tostan's approach has been to go to local imams to get their agreement that the ritual is not a religious obligation.
MOLLY MELCHING: We share our modules with the religious leaders, so that they see that everything that we do is for the well-being of the community, the health, and all these things are things that Islam espouses. And so they're very happy in general, but first of all they're happy because we start with them.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: That respect also carries over into the group's messages in general.
MOLLY MELCHING: Tostan found that using approaches that shame or blame people really was just the opposite of what would work in changing social norms.
When you say to someone, we know you love your daughter and you're doing things because you love your daughter, but let's look at this and let's try to understand together exactly what are the consequences of this practice, but you are the ones that will have to make the decision, then suddenly people are willing to listen. They don't get defensive.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It's been far more effective than the approach of many aid groups, says University of California, San Diego, Professor Gerry Mackie.
GERRY MACKIE, University of California, San Diego: When we think of an ideal way of making a change, we'd say it's democratic. We all get together and talk it over and decide what the best thing is to do, whereas some development approaches would, say, force them to do it, pay them to do it, trick them into doing it.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In Tostan's approach, local leaders and elders produce the skits and lead discussions. Their words and personal experience carry strong credibility.
Diarre Ba used to make a living as a cutter.
DIARRE BA, Senegal: I was part of this process. I felt bad. This is not right. But I didn't know anything at the time. I had no learning.
MARIAM BAMBA, Senegal: It's painful. I can never forget the pain, so painful.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Mariam Bamba is a longtime campaigner for Tostan, and she spared her 10-year-old daughter the trauma. Yet, early in her own marriage, she was determined to keep up the tradition, even though her own husband was opposed to it.
SULEYMAN TRAORE, Senegal: She insisted that she had to do it. There were so many problems if you didn't do it. If you cooked meals, no one would eat your food. It's because we didn't know.
People told us that it was our religion. If you don't do it, you'll be going against your religion. All this is false. But I alone can't do this in the village.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Doing this alone could render one's daughters unmarriageable.
So one of Tostan's most critical roles today is to lessen the stigma by getting whole communities and others into which they might marry to jointly declare an end to cutting. Public rallies called declarations have increased to include hundreds of villages who gather to celebrate the decision.
GERRY MACKIE: One part of bringing about a change like...
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Congress Sorts Through Charges and Counter-Charges in Benghazi Attack Accounts
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JUDY WOODRUFF: We return to last September's attack on U.S. installations in Benghazi, Libya.
House Speaker John Boehner demanded today that the White House order the State Department to release e-mails related to whom the agency thought was behind the attack. Yesterday, amid a steady flow of partisan arguing by members of Congress, three State Department officials testified that senior government officials withheld embarrassing facts and didn't take responsibility for security at the Benghazi facilities.
One of the witnesses, former U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya Gregory Hicks, said he was effectively demoted after he questioned and criticized the State Department's handling of the attack.
To help us sort out some of the facts in the story, I'm joined by Adam Entous of The Wall Street Journal.
Welcome back to the NewsHour.
ADAM ENTOUS, The Wall Street Journal: Thank you very much.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, first of all, Adam, do we know what e-mails Speaker Boehner is looking for?
ADAM ENTOUS: Right.
At this point, we don't know really specifically what e-mails he's seeking. Thousands of e-mails have already been turned over to the State Department. Some of those e-mails have been provided only to certain committees, particularly the Intelligence Committees, and those may be the ones that he's referring to.
And those e-mails focus on the 94-word talking points that were given to Susan Rice to deliver on the talk shows after the attack.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So that's still unclear at this point.
Well, let's talk about some of the disputes that clearly are still out there after yesterday's testimony. What do we know in terms of what security was requested for the installation in Benghazi before everything happened on Sept. 11th?
ADAM ENTOUS: Right.
So there were a series of security incidents in Benghazi in the months leading up to the attack, including an IED attack on the consulate itself. And there was a lot of calls from within the mission, so within Tripoli, from the security officers there to beef up security. The issue was the Libyans have restrictions on the number of security officers, armed security officers that they will allow in.
And, plus, the Americans wanted to keep a low profile at the consulate in Benghazi. And so that put some strain on the ability of the U.S. to really increase those numbers.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, there were requests made and the response was what?
ADAM ENTOUS: The response was, as far as we can tell, that they're going to look into it, but no commitments were made about increasing security.
And, you know, there was a brief plus-up in the number of guards at the consulate for a one-week period after this IED attack on the consulate. This was months before Sept. 11th.
JUDY WOODRUFF: But then that went away?
ADAM ENTOUS: And then it went back to -- back to the low number.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And just very quickly, not to get into ancient history, but there had been requests for additional funding for security at this installation, other diplomatic installations? That -- those requests were voted down by Congress, including both parties, including Republicans, right?
ADAM ENTOUS: Correct.
And you also had a larger -- a larger special forces contingent that was at the Tripoli Embassy, which was reduced in the months before the attack. And the Pentagon explains that that was done because their mission had been completed, and so it went back down to a lower number.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So on the night of the attack, Sept. the 11th, 2012, there's a dispute about whether or not there could have been a military rescue. What are the facts of that?
ADAM ENTOUS: Right.
Well, Mr. Hicks during his testimony yesterday provided us with a lot more detail than we had previously had about his role and about what they were doing in the embassy in Tripoli. He describes a conversation he had with the defense attaché in which the defense attaché explained that he had -- was on the phone with Africa Command and the joint staff. So these would be the military commanders that are responsible for security in Libya.
And they explained to the defense attaché that there were fighter planes. The closest were in Aviano, Italy. It would be a two- to three-hour flight to get there, but that there were no air tanker refuelers that were capable of servicing them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, either too far away or -- and not the ability to make the trip?
ADAM ENTOUS: Correct.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what about -- but we were also told that there was a question about special operations ...
ADAM ENTOUS: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: ... a small contingent of special operations forces who were in Tripoli.
ADAM ENTOUS: The Marines have what's referred to as FAST teams which are positioned in the region, around the region in Europe and in the Middle East.
But the Pentagon says that they can be deployed quickly, but it takes hours for them to deploy. And I think the -- what we have learned is that the Pentagon initially after reports came into Washington that the consulate had been attacked, the -- they thought it was over. They thought it was an attack that occurred, and then there was no reason to suspect that there would be a second wave, which occurred hours later, at the annex, which is the CIA facility.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, finally, Adam, what about this -- the allegation that Mr. Hicks made that -- what really emerged from that hearing yesterday, which is that the Obama administration, Secretary Clinton have not been as forthcoming as they should have been, that information -- investigators didn't have access to the people and the information they needed to get to the bottom of this?
ADAM ENTOUS: Right.
Well, I mean, that is an accusation we have also heard from many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who were concerned that information wasn't being shared quickly enough. In the immediate run-up to the U.S. elections last year, it was a very sensitive issue. The State Department provided a lot of documentation to congressional...
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Changing Minds in Senegal to Protect Girls From Genital Cutting
Watch Video NewsHour special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro asks Molly Melching about her efforts to educate Senegalese women about the harms of genital cutting.
Molly Melching didn't think she had much more than curiosity -- and a love of the French language -- when she ventured off soon after college for Senegal.
It turns out that this product of a conservative Midwestern Lutheran upbringing may have brought exactly the qualities and experiences needed to help engineer one of the most sweeping shifts in social norms and behavior in history. Her organization, Tostan, has helped 6,400 (and counting) communities in Senegal and seven other African nations abandon the practice of female genital mutilation, one that about 3 million girls endure each year and one that governments, aid agencies and missionaries have tried to end for centuries.
Melching's story from Danville to Dakar is chronicled in a book to be released April 30: "However Long the Night: Molly Melching's Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph."
Arriving in 1974, Melching quickly shed the mini-skirt wardrobe she'd packed from her years at the University of Illinois, in favor of the long flowing boubous worn locally.
"Senegalese are very accepting," she says of people in that predominantly Islamic West African nation. "But they would never have opened up to me if I did not show respect."
Molly Melching shows a video to villagers of Netti Daga, Senegal. Photo by Fred de Sam Lazaro for the PBS NewsHour.That respect came naturally in an almost-instant embrace of her adoptive country, where she has now lived for nearly four decades. Melching quickly learned Wolof, a language in far wider use in the region than the colonial French of the urban elite and one that opened the door to a far wider circle of friends. Living in a thatched hut in rural villages afforded a peek into the myriad problems women endured with their health and that of their children -- most of which they attributed to evil spirits and curses.
When you lack information, superstition fills the vacuum, Melching says. "It was no different than when witches were burned at the stake."
When she began what would become Tostan, which means "breakthrough" in Wolof, her goal was simply to provide basic health information, things like germ transmission and infection. She had no intention of broaching the sensitive and extremely taboo subject of genital cutting. That cause was championed by her Senegalese colleagues and friends, newly armed with health information and driven in at least one compelling case -- a "cutter" named Oureye -- by her own guilt. Oureye is one of several strong characters in the book, written by New York-based journalist and author Aimee Molloy and published in a partnership between the Skoll Foundation (an underwriter of the NewsHour) and the HarperOne division of HarperCollins.
Also publicly revealed for the first time in the book is Melching's own encounter with sexual violence while in college, an experience that fed strong empathy for the women she would get to know in Senegal. That empathy is a hallmark of Tostan's approach to female genital cutting, a non-judgmental term she prefers to "mutilation" used by the World Health Organization.
The message is "we know you love your daughters and would never want to harm them," she says.
People cannot be shamed into behavior modification, Melching insists. They need good scientific information to make their own decisions. It's a simple powerful lesson that applies to just about any development endeavor, one she hopes the book will help spread widely.
Watch for Fred de Sam Lazaro's report on efforts to end the practice of female genital cutting on Thursday's PBS NewsHour. And read about more Social Entrepreneurs.
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The Daily Frame
Click to enlarge.
Two women dance at the AfrikaBurn Festival in Tankwa Karoo, South Africa. The week-long art festival takes place annually in a temporary desert dwelling called Tankwa Town. Photo by Liza van Deventer/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images.
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House Hearing Is Latest Chapter in Political Dispute Over Benghazi Attack
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JEFFREY BROWN: The battle over the Benghazi Consulate attack was renewed today in Congress. At a lengthy hearing, a House committee heard new testimony about what happened during the deadly assault and after.
NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman has our report.
KWAME HOLMAN: From the opening gavel, the political battle lines were clear. Republicans still accuse the Obama administration of deception about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi eight months ago that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
California Republican Darrell Issa chaired today's hearing.
REP. DARRELL ISSA, R-Calif.: I want those watching this proceeding to know that we have made extensive efforts to engage the administration and to see and hear their facts. The administration, however, has not been cooperative, and, unfortunately, our minority has mostly sat silent as we have made these requests.
KWAME HOLMAN: But Maryland's Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Government Oversight Committee, led his party's response that Republicans merely are pursuing political gain.
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS, D-Md.: What we have seen over the past two weeks is a full-scale media campaign that is not designed to investigate what happened in a responsible and bipartisan way, but rather a launch unfounded -- of unfounded accusations and to smear public officials.
Let me be clear. I am not questioning the motives of our witnesses. I am questioning the motives of those who want to use their statements for political purposes.
KWAME HOLMAN: Committee Republicans invited three State Department officials whose statements about the U.S. response to the attack have resurrected the issue.
Veteran Foreign Service Officer Gregory Hicks was deputy chief of mission in Libya at the time of the attack.
GREGORY HICKS, Former Deputy Chief of Mission, Libya: That none of us should ever again experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi on 9/11/2012.
KWAME HOLMAN: Hicks was based in Tripoli, more than 600 miles from Benghazi. He spoke with then-Secretary of State Clinton in the early hours of the assault.
GREGORY HICKS: She asked me what was going on, and I briefed her on developments. Most of the conversation was about the search for Ambassador Stevens.
It was also about what we were going to do with our personnel in Benghazi. And I told her we would need to evacuate, that was the right -- she said that was the right thing to do.
KWAME HOLMAN: But Hicks said his staff also was wary of walking into a trap. And he described futile attempts to call in help from the U.S. African Command and a U.S. air base in Italy.
GREGORY HICKS: I asked the Defense Attaché who had been talking with Africom and with the joint staff, is anything coming? Will they be sending us any help? Is there something out there? And he answered that the nearest help was in Aviano, the nearest where there were fighter planes. And he said that it would take two to three hours for them to get on site, but that there also were no tankers available for them to refuel.
KWAME HOLMAN: In an e-mail on Monday, Pentagon spokesman George Little defended the U.S. military's response. He said: "Department officials started taking action immediately after learning that an attack was under way. But our forces were unable to reach it in time to intervene to stop the attacks."
Today's hearing is the latest chapter in a political dispute arising from the attack on the Benghazi facility last fall. A total of five House committees, led by Republicans, have conducted investigations. Last month, they issued a report together charging that the Obama administration had -- quote -- "willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative."
In the days just after the attack, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and others in the administration suggested it could have been triggered by Muslim protests, like an earlier incident at the U.S. Embassy in Egypt.
U.N. AMBASSADOR SUSAN RICE, United States: What this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what had transpired in Cairo.
KWAME HOLMAN: The administration has said Rice was simply following unclassified talking points based on the best information available at the time.
Republicans insist officials knew almost immediately that it was a terrorist attack, but didn't want to say so in the midst of President Obama's reelection campaign. Secretary Clinton, a potential presidential candidate in 2016, confronted the claims at a January hearing just before stepping down.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, Former U.S. Secretary of State: The fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because some guys out for a walk one night who decided they would go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?
KWAME HOLMAN: But at the hearing today, Eric Nordstrom, the former regional security officer in Libya, said it does make a difference.
ERIC NORDSTROM, Former Regional Security Officer, Libya: It matters to me personally, and it matters to my colleagues -- to my colleagues at Department of State. It matters to the American public for whom we serve. And, most importantly, excuse me, it matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on Sept. 11th, 2012.
KWAME HOLMAN: A review board led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Former Navy Admiral Mike Mullen found that serious management and leadership failures at the State Department led to grossly inadequate security in Benghazi.
Republicans argued today the review did not get at all the facts and that a cover-up continues. In turn, White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted the administration has cooperated fully, and he lashed out at the critics.
JAY CARNEY, White House Spokesman: Attempts to politicize this, which have guided Republicans unfortunately since the hours after the attack, and the Republican nominee for president issued a highly misguided press release about it in an attempt to turn it into a political issue, have been unfortunate and haven't been focused on the problem itself.
KWAME HOLMAN: Today's hearing may have resolved little, but there's more to come....
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Preventing Drug Shortages with Cell Phones in Malawi
Eighty percent of the 13 million Malawians live in rural areas, making delivering health services challenging, especially in remote parts with no roads. Photo courtesy of JSI/cStock.BALAKA, Malawi -- Saidi Masemba's clinic is a small, two-room mud hut in central Malawi that serves approximately 3,000 local residents. He sees roughly 15-20 patients per day, usually children under 5 years old suffering from malnutrition, malaria, dehydration and diarrhea. In treating these preventable diseases, one of Masemba's biggest setbacks is access to medication and supplies.
Often, he has to turn patients away or encourage them to come back at a later time to receive their necessary medication. This scenario is common in rural clinics, where supplies and medications are scarce, causing what is known as a "stock out."
Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) receive training on the cStock system.
That's why the Malawi Ministry of Health (MOH), in partnership with public health research organizations such as John Snow, Inc. (JSI), has developed a mobile health program called cStock. It's part of a larger project with the goal of finding affordable, simple and sustainable supply chain solutions that address the unique challenges of community health workers.
cStock is a mobile text message-based reporting and web-based resupply system currently being used by more than 1,000 community health workers -- commonly known as health surveillance assistants (HSAs) -- for monitoring and managing community-level essential medicines and commodities for child health, family planning and HIV testing. In a 2010 Ministry of Health assessment, only 27 percent of HSAs had all the medicines they needed to treat pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria in stock on the day officials visited. HSAs live in the villages and are available day and night for patients to bring sick children to be treated quickly.
The mobile system allows HSAs to transmit information regarding their supply of 19 essential medicines to their local health center. The system is called cStock because it literally allows district and central level staff to "see" what medications and supplies are in stock at the community level. This transparency streamlines the needs of HSAs to their local health center, hopefully preventing future "stock outs" and improving relevant supply chains.
By using mobile technology, health care workers such as Katanga are able to text their medication and supply needs to health centers on a bi-weekly schedule. "I used to turn patients away because I didn't have the proper medication to treat even the simplest case of diarrhea," Katanga said while visiting his small clinic. "Now that I've been trained to use cStock, I am hopeful that I won't have to turn away the children and I can better serve my community."
cStock is part of The Supply Chains for Community Case Management Project (SC4CCM), which is a five-year project aimed at identifying, testing and implementing interventions in supply chain management in three countries: Malawi, Rwanda and Ethiopia. SC4CCM has also trained more than 45 data collectors to use Java-enabled mobile phones equipped with data collection software to conduct assessments of community case management supply chains.
While cStock is improving access to medication and supplies on the rural and health center level, there are still challenges. Clinics are understaffed and overcrowded and electricity is not reliable, making it difficult for community health workers to have a steady and consistent charge on their phones.
But officials say these challenges are being addressed at the Ministry of Health level as qualified health workers are being trained and electrical infrastructure is a priority nationwide.
Masemba, for one, is grateful for his training, particularly given that one of his recent patients was his own son. "I ran out of rehydration salts last week but was able to get a new batch of medication yesterday," he said.
This story is part of a series of reports on the impact of mobile technology and health in 10 African countries. For more, visit The Cheers Report.
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Maternal Health Hotline Helps Malawians Stay Connected
Doreen Namasala has been a community health worker for over a decade in rural Malawi, a small landlocked country in southeast Africa. With a population of roughly 15 million, an estimated 60 percent of women report having serious problems accessing health care due to distance, according to the country's ministry of health.
Too often, Malawi's health care centers, hospitals and clinics are overcrowded and understaffed, resulting in an overburdened health system that lacks the resources to effectively treat patients.
But as mobile technology skyrockets across the African continent -- with mobile phone subscriptions growing 20 percent a year over the past five years -- the Malawi Ministry of Health and NGOs such as Village Reach are collaborating with communities to use cell phones to address some of the causes of poor health care for women and children. Problems include limited availability of timely and reliable health information, access and use of health facilities and delays in services.
Namasala started working at the "health center by phone" or chipatala cha pa foni in local Chichewa a year ago, answering about 15 to 18 calls per day. Chipatala cha pa foni aims to improve maternal, newborn and child health services and increase community confidence in the health system.
Currently the pilot project has four key components:
A toll-free case management hotline
An automated and personalized service offering tips and reminders for pregnant women and caregivers of children under five
A health center booking and appointment center
Community outreach and education on maternal, newborn and child health issues
The program has seen signs of success, including receiving 400-600 calls per month, with over 75 percent of callers interested in receiving advice and/or registering for tips and reminders.
However, there are still many factor hindering progress. Phone ownership is low -- less than 25 percent -- in rural areas, making it necessary for patients to rely on community health workers' phones to access the hotline and receive tips and messages. Telecom services and "talk time," or cell phone minutes, are also expensive for Malawians, which deters patients from utilizing the service.
Despite these setbacks, integrating technology into Malawi's health system is largely perceived as a success. After all, even an expensive lifeline is one that many Malawians didn't have before.
This story is a series of reports on the impact of mobile technology and health in 10 African countries. For more stories go to the Cheers Report. Additional footage for the video above was provided by Concern Worldwide.
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How Cell Phones Are Helping Fight Malaria
Community health workers receive new cell phones as incentives to continue their malaria rapid reporting. Photo by Imani Cheers/PBS NewsHour.LIVINGSTONE, Zambia --Tokozile Ngwenya-Kangombe, a project coordinator with Akros Research, knows first-hand how dangerous malaria can be for pregnant women and children under the age of five. Roughly half of the world's population is at risk of contracting malaria and more than 200 million people are infected annually, according to the Malaria Control and Evaluation Partnership in Africa.
UNICEF estimates that in Zambia, malaria accounts for 20 percent of maternal deaths and that of all people who die from the preventable disease, 50 percent or more are children under the age of 5.
Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite and spread by mosquitoes. Zambia is home to the deadliest form of the parasite: Plasmodium falciparum and malaria affects more than 4 million Zambians annually and results in almost 8,000 deaths per year.
Ngwenya-Kangombe once traveled upwards of 100 miles per day to reach community health volunteers in southern Zambia's heavily impacted areas. She would spend several hours copying health volunteers and clinic staff notebooks documenting malaria trends. Now, with the use of mobile technology, Ngwenya-Kangombe and health workers have been able to double the number of clinics and patients they visit per day.
At the Siakasipa Clinic located approximately 30 miles from the famous Victoria Falls in southern Zambia, head Nurse Ruth Nghlove serves approximately 8,000 local residents. During the rainy season (November to April) malaria cases are higher than during the dry season (May to October) as the mosquitoes breed in water.
Several key interventions have been implemented since 2000, including distributing long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor residual spraying and antimalarial medicines to curb the disease. The introduction of rapid reporting systems, using mobile phones to provide real-time data and the detection of high-infection areas, has health workers and volunteers excited about ending malaria deaths for good.
"With my mobile phone, I can get updates from health care volunteers while they are out in the field instead of waiting hours, sometimes days, for them to make it back here to the clinic with their reports" said Nghlove.
Community health volunteers are not paid a salary in Zambia. Instead, the Ministry of Health and partnering NGOs, such as PATH supply them with incentives including mobile phones and bicycles for their time and efforts. Even so, some health care volunteers are still in need of "talk time" -- or cell phone minutes -- to continue their work.
"I am grateful for the free phone but without talk time, I cannot afford to send in my reports electronically," remarked one community health volunteer, Anna.
Others, such as Kdnele, who has been a community health volunteer for 18 years, is grateful for his phone and bike. "I'm able to visit 6 to 8 patients instead of 3 to 4 with my bike, and I didn't have a mobile phone until I was given one to file my reports," he said.
PATH, in partnership with the Republic of Zambia Ministry of Health, has developed a three-step approach to eradicate malaria, including rapid reporting, mass testing and treatment and active surveillance. These steps are being implemented in Zambia on the pilot level with the goal of creating "malaria-free" zones which will then be duplicated in other sub-Saharan African countries.
On April 25, the global malaria community will commemorate World Malaria Day under the theme, "Invest in the Future: Defeat Malaria," aiming to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goals and defeat malaria. While many developing countries have an uphill battle ahead, Zambia has found that embracing mobile technology is making those goals as realistic as sending a text message.
For a social media display of community health workers and volunteers, click here.
This story is part of a series of reports on the impact of mobile technology and health in 10 African countries. For more, visit The Cheers Report.
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One Year Later: What Happened to #stopKony?
Watch Video The Daily Download's Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz discuss the #stopKony movement's effectiveness with PBS NewsHour's Christina Bellantoni.
The Kony 2012 video skyrocketed to almost 100 million views on YouTube in the course of one year. But was a nonprofit group's attempt to make the African warlord a household name effective if he's still in power?
Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz of the Daily Download explored the #stopKony movement with me in a special web-only segment. The key question -- one year after activists promised that the world would know Joseph Kony's name -- did it work?
"There was something about it -- maybe because it was such an odd phenomenon -- that caused it to catch fire," Kurtz said. "What we learned in even the most viral of videos, the Internet is far better at enlightenment than enforcement."
But perhaps the unfulfilled momentum wasn't for lack of passion from the Kony campaign's supporters. An Australian newspaper looked at the finances of Invisible Children, the group that launched #kony2012 and the viral video, and found that the largest portion of money it took it in last fiscal year went toward promotions.
As we noted in the segment, the effort is still alive, despite officials suspending the manhunt earlier this spring.
But Alex Naser-Hall, a spokesman for the Invisible Children group, sent us this story which reports that Ugandan authorities have said they would resume the search after "requisite consultations" with the African Union and United Nations.
Naser-Hall took issue with Kurtz's statement questioning "concrete results" from the effort, and pointed us to the group's year-in-review roundup.
"There has been so much progress made since the film's launch and the public response," he said. "However, as you all discussed in your clip, the main objective of the campaign -- seeing Joseph Kony arrested -- has yet to be completed. A ton of progress has been made, though, by the U.N., A.U., Ugandan Military, U.S. advisers, etc. They're getting closer."
Naser-Hall added it is the group's hope that "these discussions continue until he is captured."
His comments echo the perspective of other nonprofit group leaders. In most cases, the strategy with social media is to tell the story of the nonprofit.
AdAge spoke with the founder of a creative studio who worked on the Kony project after it went viral. "Usually in the nonprofit space, it's about storytelling and visuals and making sure the donation platforms work. This was a totally different kind of beast," Javan Van Gronigen said in the article.
Kelly Williams, vice president of marketing and communications for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, one of the largest U.S. charities, echoed him in an interview with the PBS NewsHour. A video that finds millions of viewers is "always absolutely awesome," she said, but that the goal overall of marketing content online is to drive donations.
Big Brothers Big Sisters posted a series of webisodes beginning in November 2011 that told stories of mentor relationships. The projects' view counts haven't been enormous -- they're downright modest by Kony standards, with some 3,000 to 5,000 views per episode. But by the last episode's release one year later, online donations to the group had jumped 7 percent. That money may not intensify the public's activism in the operation, but it does allow an organization to expand.
"Its all integrated. It all works together," Williams said.
Invisible Children has a new video on its site, and it concludes with a fundraising ask. Watch it below.
And here is the story Lara Logan recently did about Kony for 60 Minutes.
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How U.S. Obesity Compares With Other Countries
Editor's Note: This article is the first in a series in which the PBS NewsHour and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, will explore how health care and health policy in OECD's 34 member countries compare with the United States. Below, Franco Sassi, leading economist for prevention policies at OECD, examines obesity rates.
New data is providing a gleam of hope in an otherwise fairly dark picture. After decades of rapid growth, adult obesity is stabilizing in many developed countries.
In the U.S., Canada and Ireland, obesity is still on the rise, but the pace is slowing. Childhood obesity rates are slowing in the U.S., as well as in England, France and Korea.
Despite these encouraging trends, obesity has become one of the biggest threats to public health in developed countries and increasingly so in emerging economies, especially in urban areas. At least one in two people are now overweight or obese in more than half of the 34 OECD countries -- and numbers are set to rise further.In most countries, obesity is strongly linked to gender and socioeconomic standing, with poorly educated women two to three times more likely to be overweight than those with more schooling. For men, disparities are less prominent and almost non-existent in many countries.
In the U.S., however, obesity is more likely to be linked to race than to income, with African-Americans and Hispanics more likely to be overweight than non-Hispanic whites or Asian-Americans.
Hover over the bars on the graphic below to see how U.S. obesity rates compare with other OECD countries. Click 'Next story' to see how self-reported obesity figures compare with measured rates in each country.
Why do we need to halt the epidemic? Obesity and the chronic diseases associated with it are killers, with severely obese people dying eight to 10 years earlier than their peers.
There is also a financial loss. In Sweden, for example, obese people earn some 18 percent less than others.
But the financial impact itself is mixed. During their life-span, an obese person costs the health care system 25 percent more than a person of normal weight, or up to 3 percent of total health expenditure in most OECD countries (5 to 10 percent in the U. S.). However, due to a shorter life expectancy, overall heath care costs for obese people are not higher than for a non-obese person.
Many countries have stepped up efforts to tackle the causes of obesity. Programs range from counseling by family doctors and nutrition specialists to information campaigns targeting children and parents. In Japan, employees have their waist size measured as part of a compulsory health promotion program organized by their insurance fund. In the UK and Korea, national programs have been launched to reduce the salt and trans fat contents of foods.
The high immediate cost of these information and prevention campaigns, combined with the long lag-time for the benefits to impact health expenditures, have encouraged governments to use economic incentives. In 2011, Denmark introduced a tax on foods containing more than 2.3 percent saturated fats (meat, cheese, butter, edible oils, margarine, spreads, snacks, etc.). A year later, the tax was repealed after complaints that it was damaging small businesses and increasing cross-border shopping.
Other countries, other schemes: Hungary introduced a tax on selected manufactured foods high in sugar, salt or caffeine. In Finland, a tax on confectionery products did not include biscuits, buns and pastries. And for the past year, France has been taxing soft drinks.
Governments can use the extra revenue generated by these taxes to lessen the impact on low-income households or to increase the public health benefits, for example by coupling them with targeted health education campaigns or subsidies on healthy foods. In France and Hungary, at least part of the revenues from the new taxes will contribute to financing health and social security expenditures.
But taxing food is politically controversial and usually incurs strong opposition from the food industry. In addition, tax on food is far lower than on tobacco and alcohol -- also major killers. The biggest obstacle to the success of such programs might be the reluctance of many citizens to allow their governments to tell them what to eat.
What is your recipe for a better life? Good health, clean air, nice home, money? Using OECD's "Better Life Index" tool, rank what you value in life -- and see how your country measures up on the topics most important to you.
Franco Sassi is a leading economist for prevention policies at OECD. Top photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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Babbling Sounds of Monkeys Share Rhythms with Human Speech
A gelada baboon in Simien Mountains National Park, Ethiopia. Photo by A. Davey via Flickr.
Scientists studying the evolution of speech have long puzzled over why there are no good models in primates. While primates share many traits with humans -- they've been known to play, grieve, fight, even laugh -- speech isn't one of them.
With one possible exception. A group of wild monkeys from the Ethiopian highlands called geladas, which are closely related to baboons, make gutteral babbling noises that sound eerily human-like. And they do it while smacking their lips together. The combination of lip smacking and vocal sounds is called a "wobble." A study in this week's issue of the journal Current Biology analyzed the rhythm of the wobble and found that it closely matched that of human speech.
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Muslim-Christian Relations Strained by Violence in Kenya's Coastal Region
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JUDY WOODRUFF: And now to Kenya, a key U.S. ally.
During last month's elections, only one part of the country saw violence, the coastal region, where 12 people were killed by separatist insurgents. And the coast also suffers from a religious divide. It is a predominately Muslim part of an otherwise Christian nation.
Special correspondent Kira Kay recently traveled to the port city of Mombasa to explore the new tensions.
KIRA KAY: Saturday mornings, the Salvation Army Church in Mombasa, Kenya, is alive with choir practice.
Musical director Charles Muthama leads the rehearsal.
CHARLES MUTHAMA: We are very proud of this church. We are proud of the band. It is the only band in the coast, in the coast region.
KIRA KAY: The Salvation Army is a Christian congregation, nestled in the heart of a predominantly Muslim city. But Salvation Army church member Mary Ivusa says their faith had never been an issue.
MARY IVUSA, Salvation Army Church: hey are our neighbors here. Most of these houses you see here, they are Muslims. We have been here for many years, and we have never had problems with them.
KIRA KAY: But that changed in August last year. Hundreds of youths, angry over the suspicious death of their controversial Muslim leader, took to the streets and attacked the Salvation Army Church and several others in the city. Five people were dead. Dozens more were injured. Property was destroyed.
MARY IVUSA: I felt so bad. We had worked so hard. But in just a minute, everything we had done had gone to ashes. Band instruments were taken. Some of them were destroyed. Some of them even some of them were thrown on the roads.
KIRA KAY: The overtly religious nature of the violence was unprecedented in a part of the world once known for coexistence.
Besides its many mosques, cathedrals and temples dot Mombasa's streets. The city has East Africa's largest port and its historic Old Town is a magnet for tourists. But human rights groups say a perfect storm had been brewing here in recent years, starting with the longstanding unhappiness of coastal residents over neglect by the central government.
HUSSEIN KHALID, Muslims for Human Rights: There has been, you know, very clear discrimination and marginalization of the Muslim-dominated regions. That's a fact.
KIRA KAY: Hussein Khalid runs the group Muslims for Human Rights, or MUHURI.
HUSSEIN KHALID: If you look at education, for example, our region remains to be the one with the least number of schools per population if you compare the ratio. We have very poor infrastructure. And there's no other region that has more resources than coast, but, unfortunately, it receives the least from the central government.
KIRA KAY: While Mombasa's grievances are shared by residents of all faiths, Khalid says pressures on Muslims in particular have been stoked by Kenya's role in the global war on terror.
Kenya has been the target of major attacks, including the U.S. Embassy bombing in 1998. And it has become a significant player in regional stabilization, fighting against the al-Qaida-linked militants Al-Shabab in neighboring Somalia. There is evidence that Al-Shabab has recruited youth from Mombasa to fight against the Kenyan troops and it has bombed targets on Kenyan soil.
But, in response, local Kenyan police have sometimes employed strong-arm tactics that have come under criticism from international human rights groups.
HUSSEIN KHALID: Every other week, you hear of a raid, police raiding a home, probably harassing people. And then, a few hours later, they would come back and tell you, well, we didn't find anything.
And when a community feels when they are aggrieved, when they are harassed, then there's no way that someone will come to their aid, there's no way the law will be used to address their issues, then you feel completely helpless.
KIRA KAY: A main target of Kenyan investigators was controversial local sheik Aboud Rogo Mohammed. Known for his anti-government sermons and on U.S. sanctions lists for his support of Al-Shabab, Sheik Rogo worried many of Mombasa's other Muslim leaders, including Sheik Muhdhar Khitamy.
SHEIK MUHDHAR KHITAMY, Kenya: We knew that there was going to be -- we are headed for -- for bad things, because the youths were given -- the youths have got virgin minds. And, you know, they were given these ideologies by this preacher. And when this particular preacher was assassinated, right, then the sentiments came out.
KIRA KAY: On Aug. 27th, Sheik Rogo was shot more than a dozen times in broad daylight while driving down a Main Street. The Salvation Army Church was next to Rogo's mosque and became an easy target for followers who suspected Rogo was assassinated by Kenyan authorities.
HUSSEIN KHALID: The youths were against the states. The states, to them, is represented by the Christian faith.
KIRA KAY: Father Wilybard Lagho, the vicar general of Mombasa's Catholic Church, says he feared reprisal attacks from his own community.
FATHER WILYBARD LAGHO, Catholic Church: One needed only to attack a Muslim mosque, and it will appear like now it's a religious conflict.
KIRA KAY: Father Lagho convened an emergency session of a group he chairs called the Coast Interfaith Council of Clerics. Sheik Khitamy is a member of the council.
SHEIK MUHDHAR KHITAMY: We had to come out and condemn in the media, in the mosques. We went round the mosques, right, to preach peace.
It is not part of the Islamic tradition.
And we sat together. We had a series of meetings with the church leaders. We went to the public. And, you know, things went down.
KIRA KAY: Despite these successful efforts to calm the streets, Father Lagho believes radicalism has taken its toll on society here.
WILYBARD LAGHO: This relationship has been strained a lot, because on the part of Christians, they might not be able to distinguish whether this particular Muslim is a radical Muslim or he's a tolerant Muslim. And on the part of the Muslims as well, they may not be able to distinguish between an intolerant Christian preacher and the majority who are very peaceful Christians.
KIRA KAY: And so Lagho's council...
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A World Tour to Meet a Florist, a Barber and Other Microloan Entrepreneurs
Graffiti on a wall in West Beirut. Photos courtesy of Bob Harris.They live continents apart -- Symon in Kenya and Bo in Cambodia -- but they have a common thread. Both started small businesses with microloans they received through the networking website Kiva.
Kiva's website lets users donate $25 as a loan to people around the world who are seeking to start their own businesses and have been screened by organizations in the field. Once the loan is repaid, the donor can contribute the amount again or withdraw it.
Writer Bob Harris contributed his $25 numerous times and then decided to meet some of the people he helped fund. In "The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time", the Ohio native traveled to far-off lands to meet Symon and Bo and dozens of other microloan recipients.
Harris spoke to us about some of the clients he met and the impressions they made. He used pseudonyms for several people, although they didn't request it, saying he felt a sense of responsibility for their safety.
Bo's Story
Bo works on some of her plants in the outskirts of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh."Bo" is about 60 years old, a "sweet lady" who sells morning glories at market and helps her son run a motorcycle-taxi business. Of her business acumen, Harris wrote in his book:
"This tiny Cambodian grandma picking flowers by the side of the road has built a more robust business and retirement portfolio than at least half the Americans I know."
She buys seeds for $5 and makes a healthy profit by selling the attractive flowers for $40 at market. "I remember thinking, 'I'm totally in the wrong business'," Harris recalled, laughing.
She had a persistence that characterized many of the microloan recipients. "There are very few clients I met who tried one thing and then succeeded," said Harris. "Generally, they try five or 10 things, and when something goes bad, they try another." Like them, Bo experimented with several products before she found what worked, and is using the profits from her morning glories to help fund her other projects.
Symon's Story
Symon and Jenn show off their cow Grace, a Guernsey hybrid who produces more milk than most local cows in Kenya.Symon and his wife Jenn live in rural Kenya near the city of Murang'a. They purchased a cow, who they named Grace, through an organization called Juhudi Kilimo. The group facilitates the sale of high-yielding dairy cows, which can be milked twice a day. The second batch of milk is what pays off the loan, which generally takes about a year, said Harris.
The program is doing well and a lot more dairy is being produced in the region, so Juhudi Kilimo is now looking for more distribution and supply chains, Harris said. (Read more about the group's work.)
Harris wrote about trying to get an uncooperative Grace to pose for her picture:
"As I snap several photos, Symon and Jenn alternate between posing proudly, stumbling out of the way of the lurching animal, and laughing at the silly moment, big grins on their faces. Finally, Symon pats the cow's head and gives its neck a little push, and the cow obligingly turns her head toward the camera, too, as if to say, 'Fine, you win, let's get this over with.' Click. As group portraits go, it's as sweet as they come."
Yvonne's Story
A photo of Yvonne's neighborhood in Kigali, Rwanda, shows some newer houses in the distance."Yvonne," a single mother of three, lives in Kigali, Rwanda. Through a neighbor, she learned to buy staples such as sweet potatoes and sorghum in bulk, and sell them in her neighborhood for a profit.
"Eighteen months before I met her, she was renting a shack for the equivalent of about US$5 per month, and she and her three children were sleeping on a mat," said Harris. But by the time he came to her town, she had moved into a small but solid dwelling and could send her children to school. They lived in the back portion of the house and the front room served as the shop, "bursting with items all the way out onto the porch."
Her first loan of US$140 was all she needed to get off the ground. Harris writes:
"Yvonne's business model is very much the same one used by 7-Eleven and other convenience stores across America. I tell her this -- about shops just like hers on street corners in every city, playfully suggesting that she has the beginnings of an empire. She laughs, and for a moment, I can see the young girl she so recently was."
Huseyn's Story
Harris (seated) poses after getting the "best shave I've had in years" from Huseyn's barbershop in Beirut."Huseyn," who is about 40, runs a barbershop with a couple of chairs in West Beirut. He's not as poor as the other clients Harris met, but still would have been unable to secure a conventional bank loan.
He lives in a generally violence-free part of the city, but isn't too far from where former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated and where Sunni-Shiite tensions still smolder.
But Huseyn stays above the fray. "He'll shave anybody; he doesn't care. A beard is a beard," Harris said.
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News Wrap: Nelson Mandela Hospitalized With Recurring Lung Infection
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HARI SREENIVASAN: The focus in South Africa turned to former president Nelson Mandela today. He was hospitalized for the third time in four months at the age of 94.
We have a report from Rohit Kachroo of Independent Television News.ROHIT KACHROO, Independent Television News: Nelson Mandela is not only the most revered person in the world, but an elderly man fighting a persistent lung infection.
His 94th birthday last summer was a rare chance to see him in public, surrounded by his family. Another glimpse of the former president last February. He had gained weight. He looked healthier, but he's been taken to hospital twice since then.
Last night, he was taken from his Johannesburg home to an unnamed hospital.
MAC MAHARAJ, South African Presidential Spokesman: The doctors are attending to him and ensuring that the best -- he receives the best possible expert medical treatment and is kept comfortable. President Zuma has wished Madiba a speedy recovery.ROHIT KACHROO: Twenty-seven years in prison made Mandela a global icon, this country's first black president, uniting his nation. Many South Africans yearn for his style of leadership today.
But this is a young country, and though South Africans celebrate his birthday, most are too young to remember the dark years of racial segregation. A figure from the history books, he may be, but he matters here and his health is a national concern.
HARI SREENIVASAN: This evening, the South African government said Mandela is responding positively to treatment. And, at the White House, President Obama voiced hope for Mandela's recovery, and said he's been an inspiration to all of us.
In Rome, Pope Francis marked Holy Thursday by washing the feet of young jail inmates. The pontiff performed the ritual washing and then kissing the feet of a dozen young people at a juvenile detention center. They included orthodox and Muslim detainees and two young women. Previous popes have celebrated the foot-washing ritual, but Francis is the first to include women in the rite.
New tensions are boiling over among thousands of Syrians who fled the civil war in their country. Refugees rioted today at one site in Jordan when guards stopped them from trying to go home. And unrest broke out in Turkey yesterday at a large camp near the Syrian border. Military police used tear gas and water cannons, but Turkey denied reports that it is deporting at least 600 rioters.
In Geneva, Switzerland, a spokeswoman for the United Nations said the claims, if true, would be troubling.
MELISSA FLEMING, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Spokeswoman: Deportations to Syria would be, if they occurred, against the principles of international law. And so we are very much hoping this didn't occur. We do remind refugees that they have a responsibility to abide by the law in Turkey.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Meanwhile, in Damascus, mortar shells struck an outdoor cafeteria at a university there, killing at least 10 people. Syrian state TV broadcast images of the aftermath and the wounded. The regime blamed terrorists, the name it uses for all rebel groups.
The U.S. military answered North Korea's new threats today with a show of force, flying a pair of B-2 stealth bombers over South Korea and dropping dummy munitions on a South Korean island. The Yonhap News Agency in South Korea captured stills of the B-2s south of Seoul on mock bombing runs. They flew from a base in Missouri, and returned there.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said it's a deliberate response to North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
VICTORIA NULAND, State Department Spokeswoman: When a country says the kinds of things that the DPRK is saying, you have to take it seriously, and you have to take steps to ensure that, when we say in response we can and will defend our own nation and we can and will defend our allies, that that is credible.
HARI SREENIVASAN: North Korea has recently cut several hot lines with the South and even threatened to fire missiles at the U.S. That's after the U.N. imposed new sanctions to punish the North for conducting a nuclear test last month.
Banks in Cyprus reopened today for the first time in nearly two weeks, but with strict controls on transactions. Long lines formed outside banks as people waited to do what business they could. The controls were designed to prevent runs that would drain all funds from the country's financial system. To qualify for an international bailout, Cyprus has agreed to shrink its banking sector and to impose heavy losses on large depositors.
Wall Street passed a new milestone today. The S&P 500 closed at a record high of 1,569, topping its previous peak from October of 2007. The other main indexes also rallied. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 52 points to close at 14,578. The Nasdaq rose eleven points to close at 3,267.
Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Ray.
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