If you can read this message, please take a minute and be thankful that you received the necessary education, care, and guidance.  There are many countries where as many as half of the population cannot read this.  Our goal is to reduce the world’s illiteracy rates 1% by the year 2050.  With your help in spreading the word to your family, friends, and neighbors, this is an achievable goal.  Please help us to get as many U.N. petitions signed as possible.  Join us in this noble cause.

Illiteracy is one of the most contagious and dangerous diseases currently afflicting our world.  Unlike many diseases that can only infect one person, illiteracy has the power to impact generations of people, resulting in perpetual poverty, hunger, unnecessary civil strife, political instability, and a civilization weakened by the simple inability to read.

Literacy is essential in our current world.  Technology makes it vital that a person receives a good education in order to succeed.  Because of the lack of knowledge, our world is infected with high infant morality, higher death rates due to poor sanitation, poor prenatal care, and generations and generations of people needlessly suffering. 

A literate society produces doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, etc.  An educated population has a better understanding of the world and environment that we live in.  This benefits every country, every economy, and every individual regardless of citizenship.

By petitioning the United Nations to declare illiteracy a disease, we want to cure a host of related problems at their root.  If the United Nations raises the status of illiteracy to that of a “disease,” then it will be viewed as the serious and urgent problem that it truly is.  Just as the world community has organized together to eradicate polio, HIV, small pox, and global warming, in the same fashion we hope to wipe out the 100% curable disease of illiteracy.

Please join us in our fight to end poverty, hunger, and political unrest—sign this petition and help us convince the United Nations that illiteracy is the most deadly but also the most curable disease currently infecting millions and millions of lives. 

With your help, we can cure illiteracy together.  Post this petition on Facebook, Myspace, Craigslist, and other online forums to help us reach our goal and spread the word.  Please help us to end the cycle of illiteracy and make this world a better place.