NEWS

• POI Announces a Joint Effort With National Nutraceutical Center to Provide Nutritional Supplementation to Refugees: POI and NNC have agreed to develop jointly a nutraceutical formulation to be used by humanitarian and relief organizations around the world to restore and balance essential vitamins and electrolytes for pregnant mothers and young infants who are refugees or victims of natural disasters and war. The formulation, a dry powder which can be shipped quickly and reconstituted by mixing with water or other liquids, will be used by physicians and relief workers to stabilize the health of refugees least able to weather the stress and disease which comes from a weakened immune system. The U.N. Commission on Refugees has published disturbing information on how many deaths and permanent development diseases result from simply a lack of the basic essential minerals and other compounds needed during the last trimester and first three months of a child's life. The formulation will be available through NNC for all qualified relief and humanitarian organizations at suppliers cost in Fall of 2000.
  
  
• A “Window on Western Sahara” is being opened for the U.S. into this remote yet important part of the world—an outgrowth of the Sahara Marathon, a joint project of the National Union of Sahrawi Women, Shelter for Life and the US Western Sahara Foundation—to increase awareness of the critical unmet medical, nutritional and educational needs of the Western Sahara refugee children. Over 180,000 refugees, driven from Western Sahara when Morocco invaded at the end of Spanish colonization in 1973, are struggling in the desert, waiting for the outcome of a UN monitored referendum on self-determination.
  
  POI is working with the Honorable Mohamed Abdelaziz, President of the Sahrawi Independent Arab Republic in the refugee camps to foster continuing support for the distance diagnosis partnership between the Medical University of South Carolina and the Sahrawi Physicians Society.

OUTREACH

• POI Initiates Distance Diagnosing in Western Sahara: Dr. David Gangemi conducting a distance diagnosis meeting with the Western Sahara refugee doctors in the Sahara desert and Dr. Peter Cotton at the Medical University of South Carolina. 
  
  
• POI & Shelter for Life join in Tajikistan Project: POI is partnering with SFL, an international humanitarian and relief organization dedicated to helping rebuild lives and communities of refugees, to rebuild the medical services of a northern Tajikistan province. Racked by a civil war and separation from the former Soviet Union, Tajikistan is losing its doctors because they are unable to earn income to rebuild their homes, hospitals and medical practices. POI applauds SFL in what they are doing, and will be sending a team to northern Tajikistan in early October to take distance diagnosis equipment, nutraceutical supplements and provide direct funding to help the doctors purchase desperately needed equipment and medicines. 
  

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