Actress Salma Hayek appealed on Thursday to mothers to support a global campaign to eliminate tetanus, which kills a newborn baby every three minutes in a poor country.

Hayek, spokeswoman for the Pampers/UNICEF campaign against tetanus, went to Sierra Leone last week to take part in an vaccination drive against the disease.

For each specially-marked pack of Pampers diapers sold through year-end, Procter & Gamble has pledged to donate a vaccine. UNICEF hopes to wipe out the scourge, blamed for the deaths of 140,000 babies and 30,000 mothers each year, by 2012.

“I had no idea how much it was going to really personally move me … to actually see it in Sierra Leone,” Hayek told a news conference in Geneva.

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