There are many success stories. Here are a few:

Thinking Strategically
Ron Seddon is a ruddy faced Rotarian with a ready smile. He's an Australian who lives in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. He leads a company that handles logistics around the notoriously mountainous and difficult terrain of Papua New Guinea. As a side involvement, a hobby, Ron also coordinates the malaria work of his club.

Ron noticed -and was aggravated by having- at least one of his 151 workers out from malaria on any given day. He had the clerk check the books for absenteeism and always, always at least one person was out with malaria. "Let's give these nets a try," he tells anyone who will listen. "This will be an acid test. Everybody here has bloody malaria."

The families in PNG, as he calls it, live in compounds of 2-3 families. Ron bought nets for them all and gave them out. The numbers of days lost from malaria since - none. Actually, early on a couple new employees missed a day or two the first weeks of work - before he issued nets to them. Now they all get nets right off.

"Best investment I ever made!" he exclaims when telling the story. "I haven't lost a single day to malaria since."

Ron and his Rotary Club in Port Moresby, help administer the Papau New Gunea (PNG) national malaria program by coordinating the importation and distribution of nets for the whole country. They donate storage space and safekeeping along with enormous amounts of time and logistic savvy.

They have a map of PNG showing where every bale of ITNs has gone since they began. With the recent award of funds from the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria (Ron helped write the grant application) they'll be able to cover all children and pregnant women with ITNs and have enough medicine to treat everyone. They hope to take the death rates from malaria - and the sickness rates - as close to zero as they can.

Tracking Progress: Ron's Yellow Dots

Ron brought his huge green map of the island to the 2003 Rotary Convention in Brisbane. The map is dotted with yellow pins. "What are those pins?" I asked.

"Each one's a bale of nets. We've kept track of every net that has ever gone through our hands." Most of the towns have at least one pin.

"What happened here?" I asked pointing to an area mostly covered with yellow.

"ExxonMobil gave us a grant for nets. That's where their operations are. Guess how much malaria they have there now?" he asked rhetorically, shaking his head. "Best defense is a good offense. Saved themselves a small boatload of money, that little donation did. Everyplace else on the island has absenteeism like I had. Theirs is zip."