Chelsea Clinton's work for affordable medicine in Nigeria

Chelsea Clinton is getting involved in her parents Clinton Health Initiative to help prevent diarrhea in Nigeria. Dehydration is a rampant problem in undeveloped areas and very few of the people who live there have access to treatments.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Julie Steenhuysen interviewed Clinton about the Initiatives’ effort in Nigeria.

"It is unconscionable that in the 21st century, children still die of diarrhea," Clinton told Reuters in an exclusive interview by phone from Abuja, Nigeria.

The ORS and zinc work in Nigeria is in coordination with the Clinton Health Access Initiative or CHAI, on whose board Clinton serves. She has stepped up her public role in the family's global philanthropic efforts and in July took a six-day tour of Africa with her father, who founded the William J. Clinton Foundation in 2001.

The goal of the initiative in Nigeria is to help drive down the cost of high-quality ORS and zinc treatments and increase awareness for them, said Clinton, currently a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford.

Currently, fewer than 2 percent of children in Nigeria have access to the World Health Organization-recommended treatment. Increasing the number of children with access to the therapy to 80 percent by 2015 would help prevent an estimated 220,000 deaths in Nigeria.

"I would like to see us make real, measurable progress here in Nigeria and in the other countries where we are working on ORS zinc," said Clinton, including Uganda and parts of India, as part of the Clinton Health Access Initiative's new push to improve access to essential medicines for children.

"For me, it's not complicated. We know what works and we should be doing more of it. And when we don't know what works, we should be innovating and spending time and energy on designing these solutions to solve problems that haven't been solved yet," said Clinton.