Sanofi-aventis Children's Programs

Sanofi-aventis supports a number of projects in developing countries, the main purpose of which is to help improve children's health. These include: Setting up a 4 years pilot program with The Chain of Hope to improve prevention of childhood rheumatic fever in Cambodia's rural Pursat province; In Vietnam, sanofi-aventis is helping the Sister Elisabeth Association to build a dispensary in an orphanage for sight-impaired children, to build a school for street children (to help fight against prostitution) and to create sculpture and sewing workshops to generate income for the very poor; Sanofi-aventis is helping to provide social and medical support to the homeless, in particular children in Huaycan, Peru, in Bucharest, Romania and in Moscow, Russia, in partnership with Samusocial International; In Haiti, sanofi-aventis has helped set up of a medical and psychosocial program for street children in Port-au-Prince in partnership with Aide Medicale Internationale; In Philippines, Chameleon Association protects and rehabilitates girls aged 5 to 18 who have been mistreated and sexually abused. In addition to corporate-level help, sanofi-aventis and Sanofi Pasteur Philippines support Chameleon through local fund-raising and vaccination campaigns among young girls and the center's staff; In Senegal, sanofi-aventis has partnered the Kinkeliba association for its training program of bush doctors: fund of courses for final year medical students and for post-doctoral students working on such subjects as parasitology, pharmaceutics and biology; Sanofi-aventis is partner to the Les Enfants du Noma association which helps children affected by this terrible disease in Burkina Faso and Mali. Noma is a disease of poverty, which affects 500,000 children each year worldwide in Africa, Asia and South America. This bacterial infection disfigures the face, mainly in young children from birth to the age of six. Those who survive suffer from serious facial mutilation, leading to speech and eating problems.