Born Free Foundation - Keep Wildlife in the Wild

On 10 April 2007 UNICEF, the international children’s charity, launched a campaign in the UK called ‘Born Free from HIV’. UNICEF aims to raise £1.5 million to prevent pregnant women from passing HIV onto their unborn babies.  Although this campaign is separate from the work of the wildlife charity, the Born Free Foundation, the Foundation backs UNICEF’s important new campaign.

The Born Free Foundation continues to work to protect wildlife throughout the world. It is our priority to prevent wild animal suffering and protect threatened species in the wild. However, the Born Free Foundation is entirely supportive of UNICEF’s vital new ‘Born Free from HIV’ campaign. 

In 2006 nearly half-a-million babies were born with HIV, inadvertently passed on by their mothers. Without treatment, most of these children will die before their second birthday. Currently, only one in ten mothers with HIV has access to the medicine and health care to free their babies from HIV. Without this medicine and care, one in three babies born to mothers with HIV contracts the virus. By helping to provide the right medicine and health care, UNICEF can reduce the chance that a mother passes HIV to her baby to less than one in 50.

The Born Free Foundation has been working closely with UNICEF from the outset of this campaign and applauds this inventive enterprise. Through our acclaimed Global Friends programme, the Foundation already provides African communities with vital resources and encourages local people to take action for wildlife. This includes the care of children orphaned by AIDS and the provision of educational facilities to give these orphans a future full of hope.

Now, working together with UNICEF, we are able to take positive action to help protect African communities from HIV. We are talking with UNICEF to explore the possibility of UNICEF representatives visiting our Global Friends projects to develop suitable initiatives to prevent the spread of HIV, with particular focus on mother-to-child transmission.

Find out more about the Born Free Foundation’s Global Friends programme.