HEALTH

Disease and disabilities are preventing billions of people from leading productive lives. Poverty in some parts of the world means living without access to clean water and sanitation, or suffering from easily preventable and treatable diseases. Each day, more than 12,000 children die from malaria, respiratory illness, or unsafe drinking water and hygienic conditions.

Designers, craftspeople, engineers, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, scientists are applying their experience and knowledge to develop low-cost solutions to these heath problems. Responding to a global health initiative, many are designing methods to disseminate healthcare and medicines on a large scale, while others train local workshops to produce and sell the products to their communities. Some share nonproprietary manufacturing information worldwide; others are working toward making medicines more affordable in developing countries.

For instance, in India, local craftspeople are being trained to make affordable prostheses out of low-cost materials, while doctors in the United States are diagnosing illnesses using information sent via satellite from rural Cambodia. These and other projects presented here are only a sampling of the kinds of interventions being made around the world, each contributing in its own way to the much-needed effort to improve and save lives around the globe.