World Health Organization

World AIDS day was first held in 1988 as the very first designated global health day. It’s now marked annually on December 1st to provide a worldwide opportunity to unite in the fight against HIV, support people living with HIV and commemorate those who’ve died. Currently, about 34 million people live with HIV. Almost 50% are women, 3.3 million are children and in developing countries where HIV/AIDS is rampant, most of them don’t know they’re infected. Often infected mothers will unknowingly transmit HIV/AIDs to their babies during childbirth or through breastfeeding but with proper treatment, an HIV positive mother's risk of passing the virus on to her child drops to 2%.

To the billions of people who don’t adhere to the harmful traditional practice, female genital cutting (also called female genital mutilation and female circumcision) is unthinkable, brutal, and incomprehensible. Many of us have daughters and can’t imagine putting them through anything so violent and painful, so permanently destructive to their physical integrity, health and wellbeing. But to the approximately 140 million women around the world who have undergone FGC, it’s a necessary tradition that’s been handed down for generations. What’s unthinkable for them is the idea of not cutting their daughters. That is, until they learn more about the damage it does.

September 13, 2012 marks the first World Sepsis Day, an international event aimed at increasing awareness and decreasing the incidence of a preventable and treatable disease that kills 10,000 people every day. Ramona, Whitney, Heidi and Alana were the lucky ones. When they developed sepsis after delivering their babies, they received medical treatment that saved their lives. Orfa was lucky too. Featured in our documentary, "No Woman No Cry", Orfa made it to a hospital in Guatemala after her miscarriage resulted in multiple uterine abscesses. An astute doctor recognized her “miscarriage” may have resulted from an unsafe abortion and started her on antibiotics in time to reverse septic shock. For every mother who survives, approximately 73,000 to 100,000 do not. Sepsis is the third leading cause of maternal death in the US and other developed countries. It’s number two in the developing world. According to global medical experts, including Jim O’Brien, MD, MSc, an intensive care unit doctor on the board of directors for Sepsis Alliance (a charitable organization working to raise awareness about sepsis), half of the 258,000 people who die annually from sepsis could be saved with simple, rapid, antibiotic treatment.