The Vax4Vax program is an initiative of Travel Health Plus. A portion of funds from each private vaccination administered onsite in our Fremantle clinic goes directly towards UNICEF’s Champion for Children’ program, a program focused on delivering necessary and life saving vaccinations and healthcare to children living in developing countries.
At Travel Health Plus, we acknowledge that when travelling to less developed countries, we are often in the privileged position of being able to afford preventative health care to minimise the risk of those infectious diseases that are more common at our destination than they are at home.
For those people living in the countries that we are travelling to, basic health care is often not available or unaffordable. For this reason and given our collective experience of travelling extensively we have for many years financially supported Humanitarian Aid organisations in developing countries to help provide basic health care needs. These organisations include UNICEF, MSF (Doctors without Borders) and the Australian Red Cross.
The aim of all these organisations is to provide free, effective, basic health care including vaccinations, safe food, water and shelter to those most in need. Their aim is also to train local health workers to make their work sustainable in the long term. They are independent organisations and are entirely reliant on donor funding.
The following graphs illustrate global vaccination rates for three of the most important vaccine preventable illnesses.
Given our interest in vaccinations for travel we are very excited about our Vax4Vax programme. This is a very simple idea – for each private vaccine we use in Fremantle to protect our community from infectious disease, we donate 50 cents towards vaccination programs overseas through UNICEF. Vaccines used in these programmes include polio, yellow fever, measles, tuberculosis and tetanus, just to name a few. So as a patient of our clinic, any vaccines you have will directly benefit people overseas who would otherwise not have access to this valuable form of health prevention. The end goal is to help reduce the global burden of infectious disease and thereby reduce the risk for vulnerable communities and in turn for travellers.
Please feel free to discuss the Vax4Vax initiative with any of our staff members as they are all passionate about this cause.
– Dr David Rutherford –
For more information see vax4vax.com.au
© Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
