Salma Hayek, tiny and bird-like in person, looks exhausted. One ankle, tucked up under her in the chair, is bandaged from a sprain that won't heal. And she is wearing her long ruffled sleeves unbuttoned at the wrist, so that they fall away to the elbow like theatrical cuffs on the dressing gown of some glamorous silent film star. She is at the end of a long day of doing very good work.

"One dollar eighty," she tells me in her seductive accent. "Is what it takes for a mother to be completely safe from tetanus."

We are sitting in the downtown New York headquarters of UNICEF, the U.N. children's charity she has been working with to eradicate childbirth-related deaths from tetanus in Africa. Hayek traveled to Sierra Leone last year to witness UNICEF's work with mothers and children in isolated communities.

"There are no clinics," she explains. "The most affected people are the ones who live in the most remote places, and [there] they cut the umbilical cord with whatever they can. They don't even have water most of the time, and they don't have electricity, so the concept of sterilizing these utensils is foreign. In some cases even there is the belief that if you put dirt over the umbilical cord right after, it seals it. But dirt is full of tetanus. Women should have the right and the possibility to be safe."

Hayek admits that the 2007 birth of her daughter, Valentina, has changed her perspective. "I would have done it even if I didn't have my own daughter, but having your own daughter makes one very sensitive and vulnerable," she says.

Hayek's work with UNICEF is being supported by Pampers, who will donate seven cents (the cost of an individual tetanus vaccine) for each specially-marked pack of diapers or wipes sold until May 1. The actress explains that it takes three vaccinations, plus the expense of transporting the medicine, to make a woman immune for life--hence the $1.80 total cost.

"The beauty of this is that we can finish the job in five years," she says, visibly brightening. "It's achievable."