Children Without Worms

Children Without Worms (CWW) is a global collaborative health programme among two pharmaceutical giants, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline, and a nonprofit organisation, the Task Force for Global Health. The cooperative goal is to support the treatment and prevention of parasitic infection with soil-transmitted helminths, which are the major cause of morbidity in school-age children, especially those living in Africa, Asia and South America.

CWW is an effort to make the world's children free of soil-transmitted helminthiasis so that they can grow, play, learn normally and enrich their communities. To accomplish the mission, CWW works closely with the World Health Organization, regional government ministries and nongovernmental organizations. It partners with Helen Keller International to work in Cambodia, World Wildlife Fund in Cameroon, and Save the Children in Bangladesh.

Soil-transmitted helminthiasis is a neglected tropical disease as a result of infection of intestinal parasites such as roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), hookworms (Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus), and pinworm/threadworm (Strongyloides stercoralis). Most prevalent in the impoverished tropical and subtropical regions of Subsaharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and China, where sanitation and hygiene are poor, the disease is an enormous burden on humanity, amounting to 135,000 deaths every year, and persistent infection of more than two billion people. The long-term impact is even worse. In these regions, the disease is the single most debilitating cause of intellectual and physical retardation. Thus it remains a relentless factor of backwardness in socio-economic and human development.