Immunizations and Medicine Distribution
Two million children will die this year from diseases that could have been prevented by inexpensive vaccines.
More than 30 million children are not immunized because vaccines are unavailable or inaccessible, or because parents are uninformed regarding the life-saving benefits to their children
Immunization is essential to keeping children alive.
In addition to the loss of life, lack of immunization also affects the health of the overall community, thereby weakening the economic base and contributing to chronic poverty.
Children's Hunger Relief Fund has funded immunization programs in sub-Saharan Africa since 1992 – both in our children's homes and via mobile clinics which travel between "immunization centers" in various villages. The travel team administers vaccines and maintains records on the children, providing health education and advice to parents.
In addition to immunization, we also sponsor shipments of vitamins. Vitamin A deficiency is a major cause of blindness and a contributing factor to childhood deaths from measles and diarrhea.
CHRF works hard every year in order to provide valuable pharmaceuticals to our medical distribution partners and within our networks of clinics and hospitals around the world. This presents a great opportunity to effectively create a tremendous impact with our partners in undeveloped nations because these donated medicines are so valuable to theclinics, hospitals, patients, poor and sick who receive them. In recent years the CHRF Board of Directors has decided to focus on providing donations to our partners in Honduras in order to maximize our impact and help provide support that is so desperately needed. CHRF has had the pleasure of working with the same partners in Honduras for many years and we can’t imagine a group of doctors and health professionals who are more dedicated to helping their people in any way possible.
In the summer of 2015 we received excellent news from our partners in Honduras. Our network of local clinics and hospitals often makes requests for medicines when their supplies run low. Often times our donated medicines can have less than two years of shelf life before they expire so it’s very important that the medicines are expedited to the suffering children and families that desperately need them. That’s why it was so thrilling when in 2015 one of our donations was distributed in just FOUR DAYS! That’s an entire shipping container of medicine distributed in just 96 hours! This real life example of our expedited distribution is just one illustration of how desperately these local clinics and hospitals need the medications that together we are able to donate. We received many messages of thanks and gratitude, the people never cease to be so grateful for their medicines despite their health conditions.
