Healthier Lives for Children Worldwide
Despite great progress in global health, children in developing countries continue to be vulnerable. Guided by our mission, our approach focuses on both prevention and treatment of childhood disease. Prevention involves vaccination, exclusive breastfeeding, improved nutrition, and increased access to safe water and sanitation, among other measures.
Children represent hope and the future. They are precious, innocent, and beautiful. But children are also among the most vulnerable populations in the world.
CMMB programs follow World Health Organization’s guidelines for Integrated Management of Neonatal and Childhood Illness (IMNCI). The IMNCI approach is designed for use in outpatient clinical settings like those in our CHAMPS countries, which have limited diagnostic tools, medications, and opportunities to practice complicated clinical procedures. We work with local health facilities to ensure that they have both the human resources and the medical resources to identify and treat mothers and children. In communities, we implement the integrated community case management approach (iCCM), which empowers community health workers (CHWs) with training, supplies, and supervision to diagnose and treat or refer cases of pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. CHAMPS supports hundreds of CHWs to do this life-saving work. CMMB-trained community health workers also work in communities to educate them on danger signs requiring facility care, on how to prevent illness, and on when to take their children to doctor.
Deworming in Haiti
Deworming is part the diarrhea prevention that iCCM addresses. The nutritional impairment caused by schistosome and soil-transmitted infections during childhood has been shown to have a significant impact on the growth and development of children, affecting not only their nutritional status but also leaving them physically and cognitively impaired. Periodic deworming treatments can help reduce these infections and prevent this damage. Worldwide, CMMB programs implement parasite prevention programs, which include deworming activities and annual, anti-parasitic campaigns.
Every year, CMMB programs improve the quality of care for thousands of children with deworming treatments.
Almost all children in Côtes-de-Fer, Haiti, suffer from soil-transmitted worms. Fortunately, this type of intestinal infection can be easily treated with albendazole, a pill taken just two times a year. With the support of pharmaceutical donations, nurses at our partner healthcare facilities in Haiti are able to treat thousands of children in need, free of charge.