Five-Minute Time Out: UNICEF
Caryl Stern on the campaign to save thousands of children a day.
by Lindsay Armstrong
May 15, 2009
No doubt you have heard about Salma Hayek breastfeeding an African baby during her recent humanitarian travels, but did you know that she was there representing the One Pack=One Vaccine Campaign? The campaign, run by Pampers and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, raises money to help eliminate tetanus in developing countries. Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus (MNT) kills approximately 140,000 infants and 30,000 mothers each year, but is preventable through the administration of a vaccine that costs just 5 cents. We recently had the opportunity to speak with Caryl Stern, President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, about why we must eliminate MNT now and what we can do to help. — Lindsay Armstrong
I know that you’re fairly new to UNICEF. What attracted you to working for them?
Well, everything that I’ve done in my career has centered around children…so the opportunity to work for UNICEF, the group that I had trick-or-treated for as a kid, seemed to be a pretty full circle for me. (Laughs.) I think it also felt personal because UNICEF was founded in the wake of WWII to help rebuild Europe and I am the product of a mother who is a Holocaust survivor. She clearly understood what it meant to have people take an interest in other people’s children and that influenced me.
One of your primary goals with UNICEF is working on increasing immunization around the world. Why is UNICEF focusing specifically, in this instance, on MNT?
Part of it is that MNT represents something that we can actually eliminate. Just as we’ve seen with Polio, this can be eliminated. The tetanus virus will continue to live forever on the earth, because tetanus is a spore, but in the United States, for example, you no longer find cases of tetanus as an illness. You know, we step on a nail, we get a tetanus shot. It’s not a disease that is really a part of our lives, but in other places around the globe it is a very real danger.
We as an organization believe that every child deserves a childhood and that means a childhood that is free of disease. It is plausible to eliminate this particular disease. Now it’s really just going to take the financial wherewithal to make it happen. What’s also exciting about this particular campaign against MNT is that we’re also inoculating moms and moms are passing that inoculation onto their unborn children.
"For want of $1.80 worth of medication, babies are suffering."Have you experienced these vaccination campaigns first hand? What has that been like?
I had the privilege to travel to Sierra Leone this year, with Salma, to get to see personally what it is we’re doing. I also had the heart-breaking experience of meeting a child who had tetanus. When we arrived in Sierra Leone, we learned that a baby who lived nearby had just been diagnosed. Having never witnessed the disease, we all agreed it would probably be a good idea for us to see it, so we could know what we’re fighting. I’d read about the disease, but nothing prepared me for actually seeing it. Tetanus presents itself in ways that are hard to imagine. It makes the child super-sensory. The baby couldn’t stand light, so the room had to be dark. She couldn’t stand touch, so here was this newborn, writhing in pain and the mother couldn’t do something as simple as hold her baby to comfort her. It was just horrific to watch.
This child didn’t ask to be born in a place where they wouldn’t know that the dirty metal used to cut her umbilical cord would give her tetanus. The biggest frustration for me was that for want of $1.80 worth of medication, this baby was suffering. That’s the cost of the cure, not the vaccine, but the supplies just didn’t exist anywhere in the country. For awhile it looked like the baby might rally, but sadly she died. I’m a mother too and at that moment I thought, "There but for the grace of God go I."
You know, 25,000 children die each day of preventable causes, 25,000 every single day. Our motto at UNICEF is that the preventable death of even one child is one too many, but when you watch that one death occur and you have to look in the eyes of that one mom who has just experienced what is probably our worst collective nightmare, you feel those words in a different way. I think seeing that is enough to make anyone say, we cannot go another moment without fighting this disease.
About the Author
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Lindsay Armstrong was born and raised in Wilmington, DE, home of tax-free shopping and Joe Biden. After attending the College of the Holy Cross in freezing Worcester, MA, she moved to NYC to teach English in the public schools and pursue some form of writing. Four years later, she is finally getting around to that second goal. She lives in the Bronx with her two ridiculously cute kittens, Wally and Emmens.
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