Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud.

In 1989, the Countess Albina du Boisrouvray founded the Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (AFXB) in memory of her only child, a rescue pilot who died in an accident at the age of 24. Today, the association is involved in 17 initiatives for children's health and human rights in 17 countries and provides financial help through partnerships with local groups. The AFXB's Web site at http://www.fxb.org/ serves to raise awareness of the group's work and features other organizations carrying out similar missions, including the Children With AIDS Project of America, UNICEF's Voices of Youth, and the Children's Human Rights Network of Amnesty International.

Users can learn about the AFXB's projects around the world by clicking on the map that appears by following the FXB at Work link on the home page. From this page, other information is available through four links under the Health & Human Rights heading on the left. The first link, Global Issues, features various publications and links to Web sites that pertain to the health riqhts of children around the world. The second link, Children's Rights, features information on programs that address topics such as the use of children as soldiers, building child-friendly cities, child labor, and various children's human rights projects. The third link, Focus: Kids & HIV, connects users to information on pediatric AIDS and HIV research programs around the world. This link also includes the Kids Connect Web site, which provides informative tools to teach children about AIDS and HIV. The fourth link, Palliative Care, gives information on training and research programs to help practitioners ease patients and their families through the death and grieving processes.

Other links under the Health & Human Rights heading lead to online reports such as Children's Rights and Habitat: Working Towards Child-Friendly Cities and The State of the World's Children 1998, both published by UNICEF. Numerous links under this heading lead to other children's health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Vanderbilt Pediatric Interactive Digital Library, and the World Youth Forum of the United Nations System.

The AFXB site features a news page that includes the latest international press releases addressing the AFXB's goals of protecting the rights and health of children around the world. Under the Conference Reports link in the Global Issues section under the Health & Human Rights heading, the first and second International Conferences on Health and Human Rights are highlighted along with mention of the upcoming third conference, to be held in September of this year at Harvard University.

A subset of the AFXB is the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Foundation, which carries out various philanthropic activities to help abandoned children. The foundation's largest single project established the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. The center conducts research on the health rights of children and publishes the journal Health and Human Rights.