Montco girl honored for project

Montgomery County schoolgirl Aliza Glatter was honored last night in New York for placing second in an international campaign to help stop the spread of malaria.

Glatter, 13, of Fort Washington, raised money to buy protective netting for 1,400 people in countries where malaria is transmitted by mosquito bites while people sleep.

She beat out all but one of 261 competitors in the online contest based on basketball's March Madness. Only a team of adults from Boston did better, contest officials said.

"It is extremely unusual and was completely unexpected for a child to win the competition and go as far as she went," said Lance Laifer, an official with Hedge Funds vs. Malaria, a contest sponsor.

Not only did Glatter, an eighth grader at Sandy Run Middle School in Dresher, raise a substantial amount of money, but she also avoided elimination at all but the last level of the grid-based competition.

Similar to college basketball, teams competed head to head to raise the most money in each of six rounds. Glatter survived five rounds before losing in the final to a team from Boston University's School of Public Health.

Staying competitive took dedication and energy, the teen's advisers said. "She's a sensitive kid," said her mother, Tali Segal. "It upset her that kids were dying."

Glatter said she was drawn to the Against Malaria Foundation, the other contest sponsor, when she learned that unprotected children overseas were dying from the disease.

Americans could intervene to stop the deaths for a relatively small donation, Glatter learned in her research. The nets cost $5.

"People could be protected from malaria for such a low cost that this should not be happening," she wrote in an e-mailed appeal to potential donors.

The filmy, white netting works because it is treated with the insecticides deltamethrin and permethrin, said Robert Mather, a founder of the Against Malaria Foundation, based in London.

The insecticides are vetted by the Red Cross and the World Health Organization Pesticide Evaluation Scheme, Mather said.

When the netting is draped over sleeping quarters, it kills mosquitoes on contact but doesn't harm the sleepers.

Mather said Glatter's team, Peacing It Together, raised $3,500 to buy 700 bed nets in the 2008 tournament, enough to accommodate 1,400 people.

Using the malaria foundation's formula that one life can be spared for every 20 nets installed, Glatter's team can be assumed to have saved 35 lives, Mather said.

"Aliza has helped save [the equivalent of] a class full of kids," Mather said by e-mail.

The contest is in its third year, Mather said. About $150,000 has been donated so far, protecting mainly children and pregnant women, he said.

Glatter got the idea to join the anti-malaria campaign while reading about it in fifth grade. Glatter, who is fascinated by foreign culture and cuisine, decided to adopt the cause as part of her bat mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony at 13.

"I continued to think about it and wanted to help, to carry out tikkun olam, the strong Jewish concept of repairing the world," Glatter said.

She enlisted the help of her mother and brother, Aaron, 10. Her father helped, too.

Glatter e-mailed appeals to friends, schoolmates, and the congregation at Temple Sinai in Dresher, where the Glatters are members.

"I cut out slips of paper and handed them out, explaining my cause, and they would give it back with money attached," Glatter said.

Aaron organized bake sales at Fort Washington Elementary School, where he's in fourth grade, and at Temple Sinai, where he attends religion classes.

Glatter received an inscribed silver tray during a ceremony at Lincoln Center. Her award, the President Andrew Jackson Leadership Award, was named a president who contracted malaria, Laifer said.

Cantor Stephen Freedman, who has known Glatter for eight years and who helped prepare her for the bat mitzvah, said the teen took the project seriously and pursued it diligently.

"All in all, it was a very successful campaign, and a mitzvah project in which she took great pride," Freedman said.