National communication campaign “A Home without Dangers for Your Child”

The Ministry of Health in partnership with a number of nongovernmental organizations is launching a nationwide communication campaign themed “A Home without Dangers for Your Child”. The campaign will last until next spring. It will start with a drive for raising funds for children that are victims of serious domestic accidents, Info-Prim Neo reports. Until the end of August, all the subscribers of Moldcell can donate 10 lei by calling or sending a blank SMS to 9490. The collected money will be given to the Foundation “Center for Health Services and Policy” to cover the costs of operations or/and treatments for children injured in domestic accidents. The campaign is part of the Moldovan-Swedish Project “Regionalization of Emergency Pediatric and Intensive Therapy Services in Moldova”, which is implemented with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The campaign will be based on three thematic fields: poisonings, burns and scalds, and drownings and suffocation, which are the most frequent accidents involving children, says a communiqué from the project. According to the National Center for Health Management, 46,900 children were injured in accidents in 2008. 40,600 children out of them were involved in domestic accidents. About 110 children become victims of different domestic accidents in Moldova each day. The European Report on Child Injury Prevention for 2008 compiled by the World Health Organization (WHO) says that the morbidity-mortality rate related to domestic accidents in Moldova is high. Moldova ranks fourth in the WHO’s European region by the death rate from drowning, fifth by the death rate from poisoning, and fifth by the death rate from fire and electrocution accidents.