By: William Lin, Director Corporate Contributions, Johnson & Johnson

What a difference a year makes. A year ago this month, Johnson & Johnson made a commitment to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals supporting maternal and child health. Part of the commitment was to expand the Company’s donation of mebendazole, a drug that treats children infected with intestinal worms.

More than 600 million school-age children are infected with intestinal worms, or soil transmitted helminthes (STH). They live in some of the poorest tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world.

Since last year’s announcement, our program partner, Children Without Worms (CWW) has been working hard to reach more children with this expanded commitment. This builds on our work over the last six years in eight countries and this year, we added Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Yemen.

In addition to making donations to new countries, we have also expanded our donations in countries that have demonstrated efficient and effective deworming programs that have not yet achieved national coverage. For instance, in Bangladesh where STH affects as many as 92 percent of school-age children in parts of the country, we’ve scaled up and will reach children in almost of half of the country’s districts with high disease prevalence. Starting in 2012, we plan to double the donation to Bangladesh allowing the government to put more than 10 million children on the road to better health. This year, with additions of new countries and expansions to existing countries, we have more than doubled our mebendazole donation from 36 million doses in 2010 to 80 million doses, reaching twice as many children.

Deworming is often noted as one of the primary drivers that can lower absences and keep children in school, which in turn leads to improved productivity in adulthood. Up to this point, countries vary in their approaches to deworming and child health.  With this in mind, CWW has been instrumental in advocating that the health, education and international development communities work together to invest in school-based deworming to help change children’s futures throughout the world.

With the concerted strategy to institutionalize school-based deworming, a critical challenge remains. Many children in underserved communities around the world are at risk of infection, but are not enrolled in school. To reach those children at greatest risk, CWW works closely with the WHO and other key stakeholders in neglected tropical diseases to coordinate the activities of NGOs, governments, and civil societies. For example, our partner Save the Children in Bangladesh developed community-based approaches to ensure that children who are not enrolled at school also receive deworming medication and are not left out of the program.

In fact, partners are the lifeline of this program as a whole, helping to facilitate the distribution of deworming medicine in schools and also engaging in water and hygiene education, the prevention components of this program. Adoption of this holistic approach combining prevention with treatment is critical in addressing the needs of infected children and children at risk of STH infection.

This year’s expansion was a good start. But we know that there is still more work to be done to scale-up the program this coming year and after.  Our goal is to provide 200 million doses of medicine each year in 30 to 40 countries.  We are looking forward to reaching even more children with the medicine they need and putting them on the path to better health.