Keeping Children Healthy

Vitamin A & oral rehydration therapies

help children get and stay healthy.

Great strides are being made toward improving the lives of children around the world, with governments working toward ensuring the health and survival of their most precious resource: their children. Diseases that were once prevalent, such as measles and polio, are greatly reduced in scope, and child care is improving.

However, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Even now, The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 9 million children under 5 years of age die each year — and roughly two-thirds of child deaths are "preventable through practical, low-cost interventions."

The Child Health Site is geared to do just that. The health and well-being of our children is of vital importance; they are our future. If we take proper care of them, the world will become a better place.

In July of 2010, The Child Health Site chose to refocus its efforts to reach the greatest number of children in need. Your clicks at The Child Health Site will focus on providing two simple yet vital therapies to children: vitamin A and oral rehydration therapy.

Vitamin A

Everyone knows that vitamin A, found in orange vegetables like carrots and yams, is important to keep eyes healthy and to help a child's eyes develop properly. Deficiency is a terrible thing that can result in deteriorating eyesight, night-blindness, and worst of all, complete blindness, which for a poverty-stricken child can be debilitating and often deadly. But vitamin A deficiency is so easily preventable with modern micronutrient supplementation. When you click, you are saving a child from experiencing preventable problems to the sense most people rely on most heavily — our vision.

But there's more to vitamin A than just what meets the eye. This nutrient, which drives mothers to tell children to eat their carrots because it will make their eyes stronger, also makes immune systems stronger. Vitamin A is a necessary component in the development of a child's immune system. It increases a child's resistance to common, potentially deadly childhood diseases and symptoms. Children who are deficient, according to the WHO on vitamin A supplementation , "suffer a dramatically increased risk of death, blindness, and illness, especially from measles and [diarrhea]." When you click, you are protecting a child from the effects of disease.

Oral Rehydradtion Therapy

Simple measures, such as oral rehydration therapy, can save an infant's life.

Most of us think of dehydration as something that makes us tired after a long day's work in the sun. But severe dehydration is life-threatening, and because a child's body is so small, dehydration happens faster and is more dangerous. Dehydration due to diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death in children under the age of five, according to the WHO's 2009 report .

Diarrhea is usually the result of infection, and is especially prevalent in poverty-stricken regions where access to medical assistance is often limited. Oral rehydration therapy is a simple and extraordinarily effective means to keep a child properly hydrated, and saves countless young lives when properly administrated. When you click, you are saving a child from preventable death due to diarrhea and dehydration.

Learn More, & Click Every Day!

There are countless other ways in which children around the world can be helped, from increased access to appropriate health care to improving their environmental conditions, to simply providing enough food and a healthy place to grow up. We hope that you will reach out and learn about some of the things you can do to make a difference for children around the world. Please check out some of the resources below to learn more about how you can help.

Meanwhile, clicking every day at The Child Health Site is quick, easy, and absolutely free — and an effective way to ensure that more of our precious children grow up healthy, happy, and beloved in our global community. Tell a friend! Make a difference for children today.

Resources on Child Health:

Unicef

World Health Organization

Center for Disease Control

Partners in Health

Want to do more?

Provide Clean Water for Children

Liberate Girls from Indentured Servitude

Fix a Child's Clubfoot Forever

Protect Children from Malaria in Rwanda

Develop Lifesaving Vaccines for Children

Protect an Infant from HIV/AIDS

Protect Five Children in Burma with Immunizations

Visit our store's Gifts That Give More^TM to learn about more you can do!