Bed net donation for GAMI: South African musician Yvonne Chaka Chaka--a Roll Back Malaria and UNICEF Ambassador, Ida Odinga--wife of the Kenyan Prime Minister, Ms. Sarah Obama--wife of US President Barack Obama's grandfather, and Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, CEO of the Vestergaard Frandsen Group, celebrate the donation of 2,000 PermaNet bed nets to Ms. Obama's charity, Grandmothers Against Malaria Initiative. The donation was made near Kogelo, Kenya where Ms. Obama lives, on Tuesday, February 2, 2010.»

It all started with mosquito nets. Or, no, with guinea worm filters. [...] There are plenty of charitable foundations and public agencies devoted to helping the world’s poor, many with instantly recognizable names like Unicef or the Gates Foundation. But private companies with that as their sole focus are rare. Even the best-known is not remotely a household name: Vestergaard-Frandsen. »

Mr. Frandsen says the fact that a disease that caused so much suffering could be prevented so easily got him thinking about other waterborne illnesses in the developing world. He rattles off the numbers: More than a billion people are without access to safe drinking water. Diarrhea kills more than 1.8 million people a year, and chronic diarrhea is the leading killer of people with AIDS. »

While visiting a clinic in western Kenya a few months ago, [Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen] saw thousands of people lining up to get "their vitamin A shot, their measles vaccination and their mosquito-repellent bed nets. As a businessman, I can be proud to get a contract for 2 million bed nets and fulfill it on time," he says. "But as a person, I can be proud that over the lifetime of the nets they will prevent the deaths of 400,000 children." »

"No one wants to be the rock star for diarrhea," says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Danish inventor of the LifeStraw, a $4 drinking tube that removes almost all the disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and parasites in untreated water. »