Caryl Stern, head of UNICEF, is trying to save thousands of children's lives. How can you help?

Babble.com

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.

To read the rest of this interview and find out more about the campaign, visit Babble.