Reposting for Frederic Lumiere: help us get the message out for Lady Ganga

[Chris Hurd]

I don't do this often, but when I do, you can bet it's for a good cause. Frederic Lumiere, a long-time friend of DV Info Net, is asking you to help change the world with his cervical cancer awareness film, "Lady Ganga." Basically, this is a crowd-funding effort to get his film re-dubbed in the 50 most common languages around the world.

Full details at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lumiere/lady-ganga -- it's a KickStarter staff pick, in fact.

Every little bit helps. Many thanks,

[Andrew Smith]

I do have a concern about this, in that the funding and successful distribution of this film would then become a PR gift for the pharmaceutical company Merck. They are the manufacturers of Gardasil which is a vaccine that prevents some of the strains of HPV which was the forerunner to her terminal cervical cancer.

Andrew

[Paul Mailath]

I can see your point but that doesn't make the campaign any less worthwhile - perhaps we should be contributing to the kickstarter campaign and then sending Merck an email suggesting they contribute as well.

The alternative is what? seeing cervical cancer rates undiminished because we don't want a pharma company to make money? Let's lead by example and prompt them to to the same

[Pete Bauer]

On the one hand, I'm sorry to say that this didn't catch my attention until after the campaign end date of 28 Nov. On the other, I'm glad to see that the project was more than 3x funded so ought to come to fruition.

Just for curiosity, can one still contribute after the end date of a successful campaign? It would seem not, since they collect and disburse funds to the project in the 14 days after that date, but I couldn't find anything on the kickstarter web site that explicitly answered that question.

Paul, well said. I watched the trailer through, and read the entire Kickstarter page. They focus entirely on the telling of Lady Ganga's story, while -- unless I missed it despite specifically looking for it -- they did not mention either Merck or GlaxoSmithKline (which makes the other HPV vaccine, Cervarix).

Maybe they will be mentioned, or use of their vaccines advocated, in the full production. I don't know, but would like to think there is at least some mention of vaccination, because it is an essential part of the public health story, which at the end of the day comprises thousands of individual stories of preventable suffering and premature death. There are other places on the internet for folks to diverge into discussion of issues they may have with a particular company that's not related to digital video.

Frederic, I wish you and your team all success!