Sprinkles: simple global health

Sprinkles is an innovative non-profit effort to end vitamin and mineral deficiencies, one of the greatest preventable causes of illness and premature death throughout the developing world.  Their approach borders on being too simple, little packets of micronutrients you can sprinkle on any semi-solid food as a delivery mechanism.

"Iron-deficiency anemia continues to be a pervasive and largely unaddressed global health problem, affecting more than two billion people or roughly one third of the world's population." -- Dr Stanley Zlotkin

They have already proven the concept.  In Mongolia after two years of the program, anemia decreased by 38%.  When you consider Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of child blindness, Iodine deficiency the greatest cause of preventable mental retardation and Iron deficiency even has a direct impact on GDP, up to 2% loss, basic nutrition is a very big problem.  Sprinkles have been provided in 18 countries with distributed local manufacturing through technology transfer and their goal is to reach 50 milion children in five years.

I had a great conversation with Sprinkles founder and nutritionist Dr Zlotkin at a conference last week.  Their initative is ready for scaling perhaps with the help of philanthropists that read this blog.

Comments

[Nate Westheimer]

Bravo Ross for pointing this out, and hurray to Sprinkles for this innovative solution. As for what philanthropists to target, this seems like a scalable enough solution for the Bill & Melinda Gates goliath, though at the same time the "packets" are easy enough to explain to folks that one could easily set up a system to have them sponsored on a small scale by us common folk.