'Find Maddie' (myspace, show, Ching)

[brianmtuk]

Although I totally feel for the missing Maddie's family, and i would do the same in their situation, people donating 2.5 million pounds for her return seems a bit on the mad side when...

-Malaria kills more than 1 million people a year
-90% of malaria deaths occur among young children
-The disease consumes 40% Africa's public health spending
-60% of malaria deaths strike the poorest 20% of the global population
-71% of all deaths from malaria are in the under-fives
-Children can die within 48 hours after the first symptoms appear
Can i suggest that everyone stops watching the BBC news, buys a mozzie net and posts it to Africa? - call me stupid but do your own maths... (look up the cost of a mozzie net!) 2.5 million pounds worth of mozzie nets = thousands of children's lives saved.

I just looked on missing children's website and over 70,000 children are reported missing in the UK every year...
Not to sound cold hearted or anything.
The world is turning into a media circus.

[VeeW____x]

Aww. They Said They Could Find Her By Her Eyes... But People Thinks She Dead =|

Yeh Maddie Is Just Like Every Child, But Her Parents Shouldn't Of Left Her Still

[DontRunMeOver]

It's not mad, Brian, it's normal human nature. Most people don't really understand statistics so using them as reasons why people should give money to charity doesn't often work. This understanding is why telethons like 'Children in Need' work very well because they use individual case studies, showing a few individual kids who are dying of a disease in Africa rather than just throwing out stats saying that millions are dying.

People find large numbers hard to deal with so they switch off. They find individual cases much easier to understand so individual cases will often gain more interest (lack of global interest during huge genocides is often due to this, they throw stats at us which forces us to think of dying people as numbers).

Or, as Stalin famously said, "The death of one (man) is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."

And he probably knew this better than anybody. The bigger the numbers, the less people associate with what is happening.

[brianmtuk]

The world is turning into a media circus. They know a story about a little English girl will get more reaction from their viewers so they show that instead of a story about one of the million people dying of malaria every year. That is not reporting news, that is selling your product. Its wrong.
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