TheMommyBlog

Friday, August 08, 2008 Children's Health, Fellow Parenting Authors

Remember when a bunch of mom bloggers went to Cincinnati to visit with Pampers? Remember? No? The runs through O’Hare, the broken eyeglasses, the falls out of the limo? Still nothing?

Well, you’ll remember this, by golly. I designed a new widget for donations to the “Support UNICEF’s Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus” effort, to be displayed on our sites.

Not one of us walked away from our visit with UNICEF USA’s CEO Caryl Stern unaffected by her descriptions of the thousands of preventable neonatal and maternal deaths from Tetanus, a totally preventable disease. The cost of a single vaccine? Five cents. There was no question we weren’t going to do something about it.

Lifesaving Immunization for Children

Every since its first tuberculosis campaign in 1947, UNICEF has been a leader in global immunization. Today we provide vaccine to 40 percent of the world’s children and help save two million lives a year. But thousands of children still die needlessly every day from diseases like measles, polio, or tuberculosis. UNICEF is committed to vaccinating every single child against preventable childhood diseases.

When war or natural disaster strikes, we do whatever it takes to get children immunized. We help broker ceasefires so that we can enter a war-torn region and vaccinate its children. After a disaster, we go door-to-door in the remotest areas to distribute lifesaving vaccines.

Here is the widget, which also has a home in the sidebar. Our hosts have really gone the extra mile and created a page just for us where you can make a donation and receive a tax reciept on the spot. Pampers will track the donations that come through this widget, so we can see how well we’re doing to support the cause.

To get an idea of how important that is to us, have a look at the video of Mr. McCleary’s (of Pampers) visit to Angola to see UNICEF’s progress with tetanus vaccines.

Dig around and see how many nickels you have laying around, and then think about each one of those saving a mom’s or baby’s life. And pass our links around so we can get this thing to go viral. If we can’t pull it off, who can? Who care more about moms and babies than other moms and babies? You can make a difference, and save twenty lives for each dollar. I just donated fifty dollars, and you know what a commitment that is for me right now.

Let’s take Tetanus out of the equation - having children is hard enough without knowing just how slim the chances or survival are without proper care and vaccination.