Initiative
18/01/2010
Accor pledges support to Institut Pasteur to help prevent emerging diseases
Institut Pasteur and Accor form an original partnership to provide health information and prevention for travellers.
The partnership is part of the “Earth Guest” programme, which is designed to respond to Accor’s societal concerns including the fight against epidemics.
The Group has decided to considerably expand its involvement in the prevention of all types of emerging diseases by signing a partnership agreement with Institut Pasteur and immediately undertaking two major initiatives:
- the conversion of A|Club points into donations to Institut Pasteur,
- financing a health information and prevention website for travellers.
1. Possibility of converting points acquired in the AIClub loyalty programme into donation to Institut Pasteur
The members of the Accor’s loyalty programme, A|Club, will be able to convert their points into donations. The donations will be given in full to Institut Pasteur, which plans to allocate the funds to two facilities dedicated to fighting emerging diseases:
- A climatic chamber, which recreates extreme climatic conditions in order to study the evolution of viruses that give rise to epidemics as it could occur in real life situations.
- A mobile analysis laboratory that can be transported at any time by air to enable specialists on emerging diseases from Institut Pasteur to go directly to the site of new virus outbreaks to study and analyse them.
2. Financing a health information and prevention website for travellers
Accor is financing the creation of a health information and prevention website called Pasteurtravel.com. Published in French and English, the content of the site will be provided exclusively by experts at Institut Pasteur and will keep Net users up to date on the preventive treatments to adopt, mandatory and suggested vaccinations and the inherent risks relating to travel to certain destinations. The website “news feed” will make available information in real time during a health crisis to keep people up to dare on changes in the spread of possible epidemics.
About Institut Pasteur
A bioresearch centre, Institut Pasteur is a state-approved private foundation. Its campus in Paris houses 2,600 employees and 130 research laboratories. Alongside its research in biology, much of the Institute’s work is devoted to studying infectious, genetic and neurodegenerative diseases as well as certain types of cancer. Institut Pasteur is at the heart of an international network linking 32 institutes on all 5 continents with a total of 9,500 people.