Johnson & Johnson just announced the launch of Every Mother, Every Child – a comprehensive, five-year effort to improve the health of women and children in developing countries. The initiative comes in response to the call by the Secretary General of the United Nations in April 2010 for a renewed global effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals to reduce death and disease in women and children by 2015.
More materials on this initiative can be found on www.jnj.com -- and I’ve also pasted a video overview of the program below.
The Every Mother, Every Child effort includes new initiatives, such as in m-Health; builds and expands on some of Johnson & Johnson’s existing philanthropic programs, including a quadrupling of our donation of medicine to treat intestinal parasites in children , and it underscores the Company’s commitment to research and development to treat and prevent HIV and tuberculosis. We have posted about some of our existing programs in the past here on this blog. I thought I’d highlight a few of these JNJBTW posts here: Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV
Since 2003, Johnson & Johnson has dedicated resources to the prevention of mother-to-child transmission, notably through its support of mothers2mothers. Here’s some perspectives on the existing program that we shared on JNJBTW over the past few years:
In “Preventing HIV Infection in Newborns,” published on July 16, 2010, Anu Gupta, MD, from our Corporate Contributions Group, discussed the company’s relationship with the mothers2mothers program.
In "Robin Smalley and mothers2mothers," published on Aug. 10, 2010, Brittany Hume, also from our Corporate Contributions Group, shared her experiences working with the founder of the mothers2mothers program.
Intestinal Worms in Children
A debilitating and often neglected infection of intestinal worms affects millions of people, but is especially dire for children since it causes malnutrition and increases susceptibility to other, serious infections. In partnership with Johnson & Johnson, Children Without Worms now distributes 50 million doses of mebendazole, a treatment for worms, each year and supports comprehensive hygiene education efforts to reach children. This program will be ramped up to quadruple the doses we provide annually. Below are some posts about our relationship with this organization:
In “Partnering to Keep Kids Free of Infection,” published on April 15, 2010, Bill Lin from the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Contributions Group was interviewed by Melissa Waggenspack about what our partnership with Children Without Worms has focused on to date.
In “World Health Day,” published on April 6, 2010, Mark Krajnak from our Corporate Communication group shared some photos from a trip to Nicaragua and highlights the need to focus on preventing infection from intestinal worms.Development for Tuberculosis Treatment
In 2008, 3.6 million women became ill and 700,000 died from TB. TB is the leading cause of death for women with HIV. The Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Tibotec is currently developing TMC207, an investigational therapy for the treatment of MDR-TB. In June, 2009, Tibotec announced a collaboration with the TB Alliance to share expertise and resources in the development of TMC207 and to develop and bring to market new treatments for TB.
In “On the Move Against Tuberculosis,” published on March 24, 2010, Melissa Waggenspack highlighted the news of this alliance.