Sandile Mdadane

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

Michael Jackson had to cut a deal with a drug lord to film this video. The Brazilian government tried to block the shoot. A judge banned the filming. The police refused to enter the area. Rio was bidding to host the 2004 Olympics and didn't want the world seeing footage of its poorest neighborhoods. So Spike Lee walked into the favela (Rio's version of a hillside slum) and found the local crime boss. His name was Marcinho VP. He ran one of the city's biggest gangs, Comando Vermelho. He also happened to be a huge Jackson fan, and he provided the whole production with security for free. A higher court eventually overturned the ban. The police still wouldn't go in. So 1,500 police officers and 50 residents acting as security guards sealed off the favela. Jackson arrived by helicopter. He walked the streets handing out candy to the kids. The people who lived there had woken up early that morning to sweep the streets and take out the trash before he got there. Mid-shoot, two women burst through security. One knocked Jackson flat. Spike Lee helped him up and he kept dancing. That exact take is in the final video. For the Salvador half of the shoot, he worked with 200 drummers from a local group called Olodum. The media coverage put them on the map in 140 countries. They'd been a regional act before the shoot. They became a global one after. Over 200 million people watched the premiere around the world. The song itself peaked at #30 in America. In Germany it went to #1 and stayed on the chart for 30 weeks, the longest run of any Jackson song there. The video crossed 1 billion views on YouTube in 2023. Only one other Jackson video has done that: Billie Jean. He's the first solo male singer from the 1900s with two videos over a billion. The day after Jackson died in 2009, Rio's mayor announced they'd put a statue of him in the same favela where the video was shot. Locals said the turnaround of their neighborhood started with his visit.

Our school has released an updated list of top achievers ya Matric 2025 after a few kids requested a remark. There's kids who have moved from 2 distinctions to 5 😳 niyenzani lapho @DBE_SA @UmalusiSA Imagine a kid missing out on a course they wanted to study coz of this

Friends they Remain... Between this Espérance fan and this Sundowns fan… there are unforgettable moments. A year ago, he saved his life. Today, they took a picture together.

The way the DA is campaigning makes me feel so uncomfortable. In 'white areas' (despise the term), there's a certain gravitas in the way they conduct their electioneering. There is town hall type of meetings, speeches and explaining their policies etc.. In 'Black areas', they go to shisanyamas et al, dance and toto toyi looking absolutely ridiculous. They play into these racist and anti Black stereotypes and they don't even see how utterly out of touch they look

And the DA says this should not concern us

That’s why they want the wall😭

Punishing homeless children to show the world he is a better Christian than the Pope

Without Africa you’d have wooden ships because you wouldn’t have access to Mineral Resources to build technology.

They are not clueless. It’s intentional.

Wasn’t the DA making up stories about Ramaphosa allowing Russia to arm our Navy and saying it’s a threat to national security? So how is allowing US marines members training Metro Police not a threat to our national security?

Imagine if every metro did this? And brought different foreign armies to the country. It will be a threat to national security and who will be accountable.

JD Vance is lecturing the Pope on Catholicism and Pierre Poilievre is lecturing Mark Carney on economics and RFK Jr is lecturing scientists about vaccines and Donald Trump is lecturing the world on tariffs and Pete Hegseth is quoting Pulp Fiction and thinking it’s the Bible

This is very wrong. The municipal level of government does not have any foreign policy competence,this includes agreements, whether formal or informal, with militaries of foreign states. DIRCO will be liaising with all parties involved to iron this out.

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

lol don’t do this! Because when we raise facts you’ll tell us housing is for national government. Don’t play this game

Kallie Kriel calling out Roelf Meyer's appointment as US ambassador should tell you all you need to know about how shrewd of a move it was by Ramaphosa.

We need to treat youth unemployment as the national disaster it is 💔

The owner of this platform being the biggest peddler of disinformation is truly concerning.

No Tommy, they were built to keep the other Italian city States out, and the French Empire. If you're going to criticize the Pope, please ask your Israeli handlers to at least put the effort in to giving you historically accurate propaganda.