Top 10 Causes on Twitter

Voting is now closed. We had 2299 people on twitter vote for their favorite cause on Twitter.  We had 53 amazing causes/charities recommended to us during a 3 week period prior to the voting, which also occured for a 3 week period from June 15 - June 30, 2009.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the voting and supported your favorite cause.  To all the causes, great work on securing your votes, and congratulations for earning a spot in the NEW Top 10 Causes on Twitter. All 53 causes were worthy of a spot on the Top 10 and hope you will participate in the voting in 2010 for the next Top 10 Causes.

@Top10Causes will now work hard to promote, raise awareness and support the new Top 10 Causes on Twitter via Twitter, Facebook, Blog, and this website. 

Our mission is, and always will be, to bring awareness to amazing causes/charities on Twitter.  If one person finds the help they need, when they need it, through our awareness campaigns, we have succeeded.

Our mission is to provide support, education, and advocacy to people whose lives have been touched by hydrocephalus and to the professionals who help them.

The Hydrocephalus Association provides support, education and advocacy for people whose lives have been touched by hydrocephalus and the professionals who work with them. We strive to ensure that families are empowered with educational materials, informed about the latest research, and have access to quality health care. We advocate for increased research and funding to advance understanding, improve diagnosis and treatment, and find a cure.

Hydrocephalus Is Common

• Hydrocephalus affects hundreds of thousands of Americans, in every stage of life, from infants to the elderly. It affects people in all walks of life, from every socioeconomic background.
• One to two of every 1,000 babies are born with hydrocephalus, making it as common as Down's syndrome and more common than spina bifida or brain tumors.
• Hydrocephalus is the most common reason for brain surgery in children.

There Is No Cure

• There is no medical therapy to treat hydrocephalus. The only effective treatments are surgical.
• While many people are helped by surgery, many more need further operations to stay well. Of the over 40,000 hydrocephalus operations performed annually (one every 15 minutes), only 30% are the patient's first surgery to treat hydrocephalus.
• The medical costs for hydrocephalus are over $1 billion per year, yet the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests less than $1 million per year in hydrocephalus treatment.

There Is a Crisis in Diagnosis

• An estimated 375,000 older Americans have normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). This disorder often goes undiagnosed and untreated.
• Research suggests that treating hydrocephalus in the elderly population would reduce U.S. health care expenditures by $25,000 per patient, or $184 million, over five years. Mistaken placement in an extended care facility or nursing home, for example, costs considerably more than the minimal extra care someone might need to stay at home after appropriate treatment for NPH.
• Hydrocephalus also goes undiagnosed and untreated in younger adults, leading to substantial workforce loss and health care costs.

There Is a Crisis in Access to Care

• Doctors are sometimes understandably reticent to take on complicated hydrocephalus cases, particularly in adults, because little is known about the disorder. We don't always know what causes it, and we don't yet know how to make these people well.
• There are fewer then ten centers in the U.S. specializing in treating adults with hydrocephalus.

More Effective Treatment Is Needed Now

• Over the last 50 years, there has been no significant improvement in hydrocephalus treatment and no progress toward prevention or cure.
• Research is essential. At the very least, we need better treatments, with more positive long-term outcomes, and diagnostic tests that are accurate, cost-effective, and noninvasive.

Abundant Water is a charitable group working to bring clean drinking water to those who need it in developing nations. We give 100% of the money raised to direct project costs, funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need.

• Every year 1.7 million deaths, mainly children under the age of five, by unsafe water.
• The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goal is to halve the number of people unable to reach or afford safe drinking water by the year 2015. Achieving this would require that at least 125,000 people be connected to safe water supplies each day before the 2015 target.
• Up to 80% of all sickness in the developing world is caused by inadequate water and sanitation.
• Over 1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water.
• Currently high-tech solutions are proposed — these have traditionally been unsuitable for production and use in developing countries.

AbundantWater.org [An Open Source Approach to Clean Drinking Water] from Adrian Chiew on Vimeo.

Since being founded in 2004, our scope has expanded to address important topics.  These include animal welfare, but also, human health, domestic violence prevention, humane education, conservation, environmental issues and assisted animal therapy.

Amazon Community Animal Rescue, Education & Safety (CARES) seeks better health and living conditions for ALL living beings of the Peruvian Amazon region. This includes appropriate care, respect, and protection from cruelty and neglect.

The world is focused on the important global and environmental issues facing the Amazon Rain forest region.  Naturalists, biologists, environmentalists and wandering souls visit Iquitos in droves.  Sadly, this region had NO programs in place for DOMESTIC animal welfare.

This is the reason that Amazon Community Animal Rescue, Education and Safety (CARES) was founded in 2004.  Citizens with a desire to protect countless stray animals stepped in to create programs that the government did not provide.  Since 2005, this charity has made amazing progress in the promotion of animal and public health.

Smile Train is the world's largest and most effective cleft charity - we help more children than all similar charities combined.  The cleft surgery your donation provides is a true, modern-day medical miracle: it costs as little as $250 to give a desperate child not just a new smile, but a new life.

Unlike many charities that do many different things, The Smile Train is focused on solving a single problem: cleft lip and palate.

The good news is every single child with a cleft can be helped with surgery that costs as little as $250 and takes as little as 45 minutes.

War Child’s goal is to empower children and young people in war-affected areas through community-based programs, which strengthen their psychological and social development and well-being by means of: 

• Psychosocial programmes using creative arts and sports to strengthen the psychological and social development and wellbeing of children;
   
• Creative arts and sports programmes aimed at uniting children driven apart by war, in order to contribute to a peaceful society;
   
• Creating public awareness of and generating support for the plight of children in war zones. 
   
• War Child is an independent humanitarian organization dedicated to children regardless of their religious, ethnical or social background.

War Child International currently consists of two offices: War Child Holland and War Child Canada. Although sharing the same aims and goals, the two organisations are totally autonomous, with independent trustees and financial coordination.

The two implementing offices in Holland and Canada have united under a common War Child International flag to unite their efforts and to define a shared set of values, best practices, common principles and operational guidelines under total equality. Thereby creating a network of organisations working across the world to help children affected by war.

CaringBridge® is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit web service that connects family and friends during a critical illness, treatment or recovery. 

A CaringBridge website is personal, private and available 24/7. It helps ease the burden of keeping family and friends informed. Patients and caregivers draw strength from loved ones’ messages of support.

Connected by CaringBridge

More than 30 million people have visited CaringBridge.org in the last 12 months.

• More than 155,000 personal sites have been created.
• Nearly 1 billion visits have been made to personal CaringBridge websites.
• Each day, over half-a-million people connect through CaringBridge.
• The CaringBridge community includes authors, visitors and/or donors in all 50 states and more than 215 countries/territories around the world.

Spirit Jumps goal is to provide hope and comfort to the many men, women and children battling cancer one gift at a time. To let each and every cancer fighter know that they are not alone in their battle and that there are many of us who are rooting them on. When someone is looking for a reason to keep fighting we hope a little package of love arrives to give them the extra strength they need to get through the day.

Grace was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in June 2008, two days after her 3rd birthday. Although Grace is in remission, she still has to take chemo at home everyday and goes to a clinic every two weeks for blood work. I know some surprise Spirit Jump's will brighten Grace's Spirits even though she is still having to battle the nasty cancer treatments! Visit Graces Caringbridge Page www.caringbridge.org/visit/gracegwin

If you want to send Grace a card or small gift to lift her spirits during this difficult battle join Spirit Jump Today. After you have joined send us an email asking for Grace's mailing info. (go to our main page and enter your email address under "Join Spirit Jump" hot pink button on right side of the page)

Our primary aim is to raise awareness of childbed fever: we would like every parent and every midwife and doctor to know that childbed fever (also called puerperal fever or puerperal sepsis) is still a very real threat to a mother's life.

In the same way that every parent knows the danger of Meningitis, we believe that parents should be told about sepsis and childbed fever in ante natal classes and at the point of post natal discharge.

WHO WAS JESSICA?

Jessica Palmer was a Mum.

She died in June 2004, at 34 years old, of childbed fever. It was six days after the uncomplicated birth of her second child.

Jessica's story could save another Mum's life and prevent another family's heartache and pain; that is what Jessica would have wanted.

The Heartbreaking Story of a Mother's Love and a Family's Loss

Friday's Child is Ben Palmers, Jessica's Husband, account of Jessica's death from childbed fever, the days leading up to it, and the aftermath.

He hopes that people reading it will be moved, will remember how she died and realise that this archaic illness is still with us.

Hopefully, by writing this book, he may help save another mother's life, which is the purpose behind Jessica's Trust, so 5% of the purchase price of all books bought through this site will go to Jessica's Trust.

Buy Friday's Child on Amazon

The Blue Ribbon Campaign was started in April 2009 by an M.E./CFS patient in Canada. The purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness of a devastating disease known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

It is a campaign to raise awareness for ME/CFS, to end the stigma for people who have the disease, and raise money for research funds to support biomedical research into the disease. The BlueRibbonCampaignForME.org is not the originator of the Blue Ribbon Campaign. The campaign to wear the Blue Ribbon for ME/CFS was originally started by BRAME.org in the UK.  The BlueRibbonCampaignforME.org was founded to bring the message by social media with the dream of getting the blue ribbon worn around the world by people who stand in solidarity with those suffering in silence and invisibility with ME/CFS around the world.

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