The Elders of WLBOTT are proud to support the good work of Helen Keller International.
At Helen Keller International, we are guided by the fierce optimism of our co-founder, Helen Keller, who advocated for people who would have otherwise been left behind.
Today, inequities in health and food systems rob more than one billion people around their world from their right to achieve good health, sound nutrition, and discover their own, true potential. Improving those systems are the only way to improve lives on a large scale and for the long term. – Helen Keller Intl
Together, with our generous community of donors and partners, we provide the right support at the right time for 73 million children and family members around the world – helping them to grow and eat nutritious food, stave off malnutrition, build strong immune systems, access life-saving medical treatments, and prevent and treat blindness and vision loss.
Helen Keller Intl
Helen Keller Intl
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Floor 2
New York, NY 10017
https://helenkellerintl.org/
Images from the Helen Keller Intl website.
Charity Navigator’s Evaluation
Charity Navigator gives Helen Keller Intl 4 stars, 99%!
GiveWell => Helen Keller Intl
Helen Keller Intl is one of a handful of non-profits recommended by GiveWell.
GiveWell is an interesting organization. They do a hard-headed analysis of non-profits and attempt to quantify their effectiveness in saving lives and reducing suffering.
They are very open with their analysis, and make it available on their web site.
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization’s budget that is spent on overhead.
In 2006, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who worked at a hedge fund in Connecticut, formed an informal group with colleagues to evaluate charities based on data and performance metrics similar to those they used at the fund, and were surprised to find the data often didn’t exist. The next year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed GiveWell as a nonprofit to provide financial analyst services to donors. They eventually decided to rate charities based on the metric of how much money it cost to save a life.
Wikipedia
GiveWell‘s origin story is detailed in the book Peter Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.
What is Vitamin A?
Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin and an essential nutrient for animals. [ed. note – this is followed by a lot of complicated science stuff]
Wikipedia
Deficiency
Vitamin A deficiency is common in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Deficiency can occur at any age, but is most common in pre-school-age children and pregnant women, the latter due to a need to transfer retinol to the fetus. The causes are low intake of retinol-containing, animal-sourced foods and low intake of carotene-containing, plant-sourced foods. Vitamin A deficiency is estimated to affect approximately one third of children under the age of five around the world, possibly leading to the deaths of 670,000 children under five annually.
Between 250,000 and 500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency is “the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness”, according to UNICEF. It also increases the risk of death from common childhood conditions, such as diarrhea. UNICEF regards addressing vitamin A deficiency as critical to reducing child mortality, the fourth of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.
Wikipedia
Fortification
Some countries require or recommend fortification of foods. As of January 2022, 37 countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, require food fortification of cooking oil, rice, wheat flour or maize (corn) flour with vitamin A, usually as retinyl palmitate or retinyl acetate. Examples include Pakistan, oil, 11.7 mg/kg and Nigeria, oil, 6 mg/kg; wheat and maize flour, 2 mg/kg. An additional 12 countries, mostly in southeast Asia, have a voluntary fortification program. For example, the government of India recommends 7.95 mg/kg in oil and 0.626 mg/kg for wheat flour and rice. However, compliance in countries with voluntary fortification is lower than countries with mandatory fortification. No countries in Europe or North America fortify foods with vitamin A.
Vitamin A supplementation (VAS)
Delivery of oral high-dose supplements remains the principal strategy for minimizing deficiency. As of 2017, more than 80 countries worldwide are implementing universal VAS programs targeted to children 6–59 months of age through semi-annual national campaigns. Doses in these programs are one dose of 50,000 or 100,000 IU for children aged 6 to 11 months and 100,000 to 200,000 IU for children aged 12 months to five years, every four to six months
In 2008, the World Health Organization estimated that vitamin A supplementation over a decade in 40 countries averted 1.25 million deaths due to vitamin A deficiency. A Cochrane review reported that vitamin A supplementation is associated with a clinically meaningful reduction in morbidity and mortality in children ages six month to five years of age. All-cause mortality was reduced by 14%, and incidences of diarrhea by 12%.
Wikipedia
- β-carotene can be extracted from fungus Blakeslea trispora, marine algae Dunaliella salina or genetically modified yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
- The world market for synthetic retinol is primarily for animal feed, leaving approximately 13% for a combination of food, prescription medication and dietary supplement use. – Wikipedia
Semi-Sequitur: Who is Dag Hammarskjöld?
Helen Keller Intl
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Floor 2
New York, NY 10017
So who is Dag Hammarskjöld?
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld (29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. As of 2023, he remains the youngest person to have held the post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed. He was a son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917. – Wikipedia
Immediately following the assumption of the Secretariat, Hammarskjöld attempted to establish a good rapport with his staff. He made a point of visiting every UN department to shake hands with as many workers as possible, eating in the cafeteria as often as possible, and relinquishing the Secretary-General’s private elevator for general use…. He spearheaded the building of a meditation room at the UN headquarters, where people can withdraw into themselves in silence, regardless of their faith, creed, or religion.
Wikipedia
The Death of Dag Hammarskjold
On 18 September 1961, Hammarskjöld was en route to negotiate a cease-fire between United Nations Operation in the Congo forces and Katangese troops under Moise Tshombe. His Douglas DC-6 airliner SE-BDY crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld perished as a result of the crash, as did all of the 15 other passengers. Hammarskjöld’s death set off a succession crisis at the United Nations,[ as there was no line of succession and the Security Council had to vote on a successor.
The circumstances of the crash are still unclear. A 1962 Rhodesian inquiry concluded that pilot error was to blame, while a later UN investigation could not determine the cause of the crash. There is evidence suggesting the plane was shot down. A CIA report claimed the KGB was responsible.
The day after the crash, former U.S. President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him‘.”
Wikipedia
By Conny Odengrund – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
By Dig deeper – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
One Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza is a skyscraper located at 885 Second Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It is a 628-foot (191 m) tall skyscraper. It was designed by Emery Roth and developed by Lawrence Ruben. Named for Dag Hammarskjöld, it was completed in 1972 and has 49 floors. It has 750,000 square feet (70,000 m2) of floor area and is the 102nd tallest building in New York.
Its main usage is office space. Denmark, Turkey, Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Chile, Belgium, Ireland, Austria and Sweden all have their permanent missions to the United Nations located in this building, while Norway and Belgium have consulates there. Communications company Dell Publishing is also a tenant. It is owned by Rockpoint Group, who bought the building from the Ruben Companies in 2018 for $600 million. Andy Warhol’s Factory stood on the site (on 47th Street) from 1963 to 1967.
Wikipedia
Just down the road is the Dag Hammarskjold park, the United Nations, and the UN Garden “Good Defeats Evil”.
United Nations Garden “Good Defeats Evil”
Good Defeats Evil is a bronze sculpture by Soviet / Russian painter and sculptor Zurab Tsereteli (1934 – ) who is well-known for large structures.
Seen here is a human defeating a dragon, as in the story of Saint George and the Dragon. The tale tells of St. George slaying a dragon that demanded sacrifices from nearby villagers. Once the villagers ran out of livestock, they offered humans and when a well-loved princess was selected to be sacrificed, the saint rescues the lady. Here we have a new interpretation of the story.
An allegorical St. George, astride a rearing horse, drives his lance through a dragon. The dragon is not the mythological beast of early Christian tradition, but rather represents the vanquishing of nuclear war through the historic treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States. Created as a monument to peace, the sculpture is composed of parts of actual United States and Soviet missiles. Accordingly, the dragon is shown lying amid actual fragments of these weapons, the broken pieces of Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing missiles.
United Nations
Vitamin A: a Word About Polar Bear Liver
We would be remiss if you did not warn our visitors about the dangers of eating polar bear liver.
Polar bears are top carnivores that bioaccumulate the vitamin A produced by marine algae lower down the food chain. Because vitamin A isn’t water-soluble, it can’t be easily flushed from the body and is stored in the liver instead. Bears and seals have generally high levels of vitamin A in their livers but polar bears have the most of any animal.
The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for vitamin A in humans is 0.9mg, and you can get that from eating just one-tenth of a gram of the liver from a well-fed polar bear. The entire liver contains enough vitamin A to kill as many as 52 adults! If you spread it out and ate just enough to get your RDA every day, that liver would last you 143 years!
Science Focus
So skip the Polar Bear Liver and go for one of these….
TOTOT: Cute Twine-Enabled Polar Bears
2 replies on “Helen Keller Intl => Vitamin A => Dag Hammarskjöld => Polar Bears”
Thank you for this most informative and interesting BLOTT. I am returning my package of frozen polar bear liver immediately.
[…] A deficiency is a huge problem in the developing world. WLBOTT has covered the topic in a recent BLOTT . Vitamin A deficiency leads to a lot of suffering, especially in children, causing blindness, […]