International Day of Charity

Thanks to your support, we purchased 70 vials of Cidofovir for $27,285 for five-year-old Matvey and sent the medication to him in August. Matvey is being treated for acute myeloid leukemia. Intensive treatment severely weakens the immune system, making viral infections that are almost harmless to healthy people potentially dangerous.

Matvey’s treatment is exactly the kind of case we created Meds4Kids for: to ask for help in advance, before we know which children will need which medications.

Each year, medical specialists use data from previous years and changes in the pharmaceutical landscape to estimate how much of each medication from abroad may be urgently needed. Our donors make it possible for us to pay for these medications quickly when an actual need arises.

This year, we expected to fund about 60 vials of Cidofovir, a medication used to fight cytomegalovirus and adenovirus infections that is not registered in Russia. But sometimes illness doesn’t care about statistics. By the end of August, we had already paid for 110 vials, 70 of them urgently needed for Matvey alone. Our new goal is at least 120 vials. And Cidofovir is only one of the medications children may urgently need.

Today is the International Day of Charity — in other words, your day. It is a perfect day to explain how Meds4Kids works and why recurring donations are so important: they allow us to be ready to help even before we know the name of the child or the medication they will need.