The Virtual Food Drive

The Food Bank for New York City is having a Virtual Food Drive, and every donation of $10 helps provide meals for 65 people. Each $100 donation feeds 650 people.

What about all those cans you've been saving? Donate them to your local food pantry. The Virtual Food Drive actually helps the Food Bank save costs through bulk buying and special partnerships with food donors, and donations help buy supplemental food and grocery products that traditional food drives don't attract.

Learn about the Virtual Food Drive here
Fill up your virtual food cart here

Pledges For Iraq Leave Poverty, AIDS In The Cold
Dollars to Iraq is 10x dollars to Global Fund

According to an Associated Press report, the $33 billion in pledges to rebuild Iraq during the next four years -- including $20 billion from the U.S. -- is more than 10 times the U.N. Development Program's annual funds of $2.8 billion for all underdeveloped countries and nearly 10 times the pledges to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which kill millions every year.

Roughly 42 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, more than 28 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 20 million have died, says the U.N. World Health Organization. With the right funding, the organization says, it could get 3 million more people onto anti-AIDS medications by 2005.

Key quote:

"I don't deny that Iraqis are under stress and numbers of them are dying tragically. But I am forced to point out that more than 2 million Africans are dying of AIDS every year, and their poverty is vastly more wretched," [Stephen Lewis, the U.N. secretary-general's special envoy for AIDS in Africa] said. "There is something fundamentally wrong with the sense of moral balance."

Get the full AP story at azcentral.com

Choosing Between Milk and Medicine
Medicaid institutes $3 co-pay

In January, Medicaid recipients, who are already toeing the poverty line, will have to pay $3 per prescription if their medicine is not on the list of the state's preferred drugs, according to Cleveland's The Plain Dealer.

Besides Ohio, 36 other states have instituted the fees in an effort to control rising Medicaid costs. Drug prices typically rise an average of 18 percent a year and can cost a state billions of dollars.

Key quote:

"For some people, $3 is the difference between buying drugs or a gallon of milk," said Gail Long, executive director of Merrick House, a neighborhood center on Cleveland's near West Side.

Get the full story at The Plain Dealer