From Mark Krajnak, Manager, Corporate Communication, Johnson & Johnson

April 7th is World Health Day. Late last year, I had the opportunity to travel to Nicaragua for a story we were working on for the Johnson & Johnson 2009 Annual Report and I had the chance to see how Johnson & Johnson is working to keep children free of infection.

The story, which you can read here, focuses on Fernanda, an active fourth grader who lives her family in Jinotepe, Nicaragua, about an hour or so away from Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua. But while Managua is very hustling and bustling and where most travelers go, Jinotepe is less visited but gives one a true taste of the culture and heritage of the country.

Unfortunately, Nicaragua is one of the second poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and that’s what puts children like Fernanda and her brother Luis, at risk for infection with soil-transmitted helminths, or STH: roundworms, whipworms and hookworms.

About 400 million children worldwide are at risk of infection.  Found mostly in tropical and subtropical areas, STH is caused by a lack of clean water and sanitation. When Fernanda, and her little brother, Luis, are infected, they are listless, tired and don’t want to eat.

It’s quite easy to see how kids like Fernanda and Luis can get infected – if conditions aren’t sanitary, children get infected through contaminated food or when larvae penetrate the skin in the case of hookworms.

Johnson & Johnson is working to help defeat this infection. In 2005, Johnson & Johnson partnered with The Task Force for Global Health to create Children Without Worms (CWW), the first program to focus solely on global treatment and prevention of STH. Through CWW, Johnson & Johnson donates a deworming medication, mebendazole, which Fernanda and other kids receive on a yearly basis at school.

When I had the chance to visit with Fernanda and her family a few weeks before Christmas, they were all healthy and happy. Fernanda has a smile that lights up a room and Luis, like any 3 year old, doesn’t stop moving. Whether riding their bikes, playing on the swing set or kicking a soccer ball, they bore no trace of infection.

It was an eye-opening trip for me. And it was great for me to meet children like Fernanda and Luis who are directly affected by the work that Johnson & Johnson and our partners, like The Task Force for Global Health and CWW, do every day.

By Doug Chia, Senior Counsel & Assistant Corporate Secretary, Johnson & Johnson

This is my first post on JNJ BTW.

Today, I’m writing on a subject near and dear to my heart—shareholder voting. You may have heard that earlier this month the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a number of corporate governance reforms aimed at shoring up investor confidence. You can read about all of those reforms in the SEC’s press release, but I’d like to highlight in this post what is perhaps the most significant of these reforms—one that may directly impact you if you own Johnson & Johnson stock through a brokerage account–the elimination of the “broker vote” in uncontested director elections.

For those of you who don’t live and breathe this subject, I’ll attempt to translate that into plain English.
Previously, under the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, if stock brokers didn’t receive instructions from clients on how to vote their shares on the election of the board of directors at an upcoming annual meeting, the broker had the discretion to vote those uninstructed shares as they deemed appropriate. Since typically retail brokerage account holders who did vote tended to vote in favor of the recommendations made by the listed company’s management team, most brokers voted uninstructed shares along management’s recommendations.

To illustrate how this discretionary broker voting worked, let’s say you owned 100 shares of Johnson & Johnson stock in a brokerage account at XYZ-Trade. You received your Johnson & Johnson Annual Report, Proxy Statement and proxy card for the April 23, 2009 Annual Meeting in the mail from XYZ-Trade sometime in mid-March. As you typically do every year, you perused the Chairman’s letter and some of the stories about Johnson & Johnson’s newest business developments in the Annual Report, but you didn’t mail your proxy card back to XYZ-Trade in time to vote on the Johnson & Johnson Board of Directors or other business. In the final days before the Annual Meeting, XYZ-Trade saw that you had not instructed them on how to vote your 100 shares of Johnson & Johnson stock and thus cast the votes for the election of directors on your behalf.

Because of the SEC’s recent action, your broker will not be able to do this for next year’s Johnson & Johnson Annual Meeting. From now on, if you don’t take the affirmative step of telling your broker how to vote your shares in director elections, your votes will not be counted at all. Why am I taking the time to explain this to you? Basically, I am encouraging you to vote. Vote your shares at next year’s Annual Meeting and at every shareholder meeting after that one for as long as you own Johnson & Johnson stock. Vote in line with Johnson & Johnson management’s recommendations or vote against them if that’s what you wish. Just please take the time to vote, not only for our shareholder meetings, but for all of the companies in which you hold stock. We think it’s important that you do so. After all, voting in director elections is your legal right as a shareholder and starting now, if you don’t, no one will do it for you. At Johnson & Johnson, we believe in shareholder engagement and hope you exercise your right to vote going forward.

By Mark Krajnak, Manager, Corporate Communications, Johnson & Johnson

2008 Annual Report

A few weeks ago, shareholders of Johnson & Johnson began receiving their 2008 Johnson & Johnson Annual Report in the mail. When the last report rolled off of the printing press back in the middle of February, this was the culmination, for me, of a project that I began working on since the previous May.

The annual report project is one of my favorite projects to work on. This is now my fifth one, having done four others with other companies. But in each case, working on this project helps give me such great insight into the company, especially one like Johnson & Johnson.

While the back section is devoted the financial health of a company, it’s in the front section where you can find some very compelling stories about the doctors and patients and other people who use our products.

Rolling off the presses

In this year’s report, For example, you’ll meet a football-playing orthopaedic surgeon from northeast Pennsylvania that transforms lives with his surgical skill; a young mother from northern China who took part in consumer research that helped us develop a long-lasting skin cream for children; and a HIV-positive mother from South Africa who is a mentor with the mothers2mothers program, a program that teaches other HIV-positive mothers the steps they can take to keep their children HIV negative. This is just one of more than 100 HIV/AIDS programs that Johnson & Johnson supports across 50 countries.

These are just a few of the stories, but there are many more. And while it was hard to decide which stories we should focus on for this report, I feel the ones we selected are not only compelling but also show how Johnson & Johnson touches so many lives on a daily basis.

All of these stories are now available over at our corporate website or you can see them in a virtual version of the annual report. We would love to know what you think.