To a lot people, throwing up after a drinking spree is not considered alcohol abuse. However, drinking excessively over a prolonged pattern of time can lead to alcohol abuse. The disease can affect an individual’s life especially in the areas of work, education, and relationships among others.

About 20% of men and 10% of women in the United States are affected by alcohol abuse. Symptoms of alcohol abuse may include repeated occasions of red bloodshot eyes combined with the lingering odor of alcohol on the person’s breath and skin. Also the afflicted individual may usually be hot tempered, or apathetic and passive. In worst cases they may show signs of bad hygiene, inconsistency in work performance and attendance and involvement in auto accidents if they still drive while intoxicated.

Sadly the disease has claimed the lives of more than 2000 people under the age of 21 in violent motor vehicle accidents annually. Though motorists who suffer from alcoholism would sometimes be pulled over, by the police, these instances are not enough to make them stop completely and seek help deliberately. People who suffer from alcoholism should seek outside help and support to fight the disease.

There are many institutions that help individuals afflicted with alcoholic abuse. These institutions provide individuals treatment programs that people can go through to recover. Most treatment programs include detoxification, education, support groups, counseling, family meetings and aftercare.

People, who live in Texas, would definitely benefit from these treatment programs, since apparently the state itself leads the union in terms of drunk-driving fatalities. Texans who may know someone or themselves are experiencing alcohol abuse can seek the aid of rehab Austin centers, to benefit from the rehab treatment programs they provide. They in turn may be able to get their health and life back. They should do this to curb the long-term damage this disease can bring to their lives.

It is in the best interest of the afflicted individual to be enlisted in programs provided by rehab Austin Texas centers to get their lives back in order. If not taken seriously, alcoholic abuse can really hurt the individual and even cause their deaths, or the death of the people surrounding him.

Knowing which rehab Austin Texas centers to trust is highly beneficial not just to an alcoholic but to everyone. Someone else might know a friend or family member who needs to get into rehab and start anew. For further information regarding alcoholic abuse and its adverse effects, visit www.alcoholism.about.com.

Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012

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FELLOWS

Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands – and potentially millions – of lives.
www.mfarm.co.ke/

Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
crowdflower.com/

Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani – Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani – Kenya ("We are Peace – Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
sisiniamani.org/

Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
www.outsidethewirellc.com/

Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
www.okcopay.com/

Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute

Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews’ core mission, Quintanilla’s projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
internews.org/

Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet’s "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
matternet.us/

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative’s rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion

Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child’s Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child’s Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe’s team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
achildsright.org/

Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
www.switchboard.org/

Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
microclinics.org/

Substance abuse: Pilot initiative will help Mercer
That's why we welcome the recent announcement of a new pilot program that will offer community-based substance abuse treatment to people on probation, parole and supervised release in nine southern West Virginia counties, including Mercer. Phase 1 of …
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Dennis Rodman enters facility for alcohol treatment
Retired basketball star Dennis Rodman has checked himself into an alcohol-treatment program, his spokesman said yesterday, only days after he returned to the United States from North Korea, where he ignited a furor over comments he made about a U.S. …
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Dennis Rodman: 'Not an alcoholic'
Dennis Rodman checked into an alcohol-rehabilitation center to re-evaluate his life, not give up drinking. "I needed to decompress from all the things I was going through," Rodman said Friday by phone from Miami. "I was trying to get this game going …
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Does Calling Heroin Addiction A Brain Disease Help Avoid Tragedies Like Philip …
The dominant model for addiction treatment in the United States is the 12-step approach promoted by Alcoholics Anonymous, which describes addiction as a disease yet advocates what amounts to a spiritual cure—one that does not seem to work better than …
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Drug Treatment Court Fund established at Kalamazoo Community Foundation
DTCF supported the work of the Drug Treatment Court in Kalamazoo County, which began in 1992 as one of only 12 in the country at that time. The new fund will provide a permanent source of revenue for programs that give people the chance to repair their …
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Children with cancer 'denied drugs because of EU rules'
Although waivers are appropriate when an adult cancer drug will not work in childhood cancers, says the ICR, they are often granted even when a drug has a broader action and could potentially treat childhood tumours. For example, drugs have been …
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Cobourg patient drew the 'short straw' in cancer drug trial
“The desire to do the best you can for a patient and for a patient to get the treatment that you think could help them, versus the need to be certain that treatments really work and that there's a real benefit and it's worth whatever risk, that's …
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Dennis Rodman checks into alcohol rehab center: agent
(Reuters) – Retired basketball star Dennis Rodman has checked himself into an alcohol treatment program, his spokesman said Saturday, just days after returning to the United States from North Korea, where he ignited a furor over comments he made about …
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The Worm has poked his head out of rehab — and not much has changed. Failed ambassador and ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman broke his self-imposed silence Friday in a rambling interview from an alcohol treatment center. At one point, Rodman conceded …
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Dennis Rodman checks into alcohol rehab after N. Korea trip
(CNN) — Former basketball star Dennis Rodman has checked into an alcohol-rehabilitation center after facing backlash for his visit to North Korea. "Dennis Rodman came back from North Korea in pretty rough shape emotionally. The pressure that was put …
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Dennis Rodman checks into rehab, says agent
Retired basketball star Dennis Rodman has checked himself into an alcohol treatment program, his spokesman said Saturday, just days after returning to the United States from North Korea, where he ignited a furor over comments he made about an American …
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