Ten million children under the age of five die every year around the globe and six-million of those deaths are easily preventable, a leading medical journal reveals today.
Five articles in the Lancet, two published today and three more to run within the month, indict the poor leadership that has let good initiatives to improve children’s health go by the wayside as other priorities have come along.
The articles, which have been written and researched by public health experts, call for renewed efforts to cut the death toll.
”Child survival is the most pressing moral, public health and political issue of our time,” says Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet.
”The cruel neglect of the health of the world’s children reflects gross failures at every level.”
Basic diseases of poverty kill most children — efforts to prevent and treat diarrhoea and pneumonia would save millions of lives, especially in the six countries where half the under-five deaths occur: India, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia.
Other big child killers are measles, for which there are vaccinations, and malaria, for which there are insecticide-treated bednets. Among the most important risk factors for child mortality are unsafe drinking water and a lack of breastfeeding.
”There is no need to wait for new vaccines, new drugs or new technology, although all these things must remain on the agenda as a basis for improving our efficiency and effectiveness in the future. The primary challenge today is to transfer what we already know into action,” says Gareth Jones from Unicef, lead author of one of the papers.
The papers come from a group of academics and child health experts who are appalled at the world’s failure to stop the unnecessary deaths of small children in the poorest countries.
In 1982, Jim Grant, then executive director of Unicef, launched what was called the Child Survival Revolution, which had universal support and delivered results.
The average number of under-five deaths dropped from 117 per 1 000 in 1980 to 93 per 1 000 in 1990.
”Since the mid-1990s, however, this momentum has been lost, and gains in child survival have slowed or been reversed,” one of the Lancet papers said.
Overall, child survival dropped by 10% instead of the planned 33% in the next decade, but the picture in some parts of the world was much worse.
”In 2000, rates of child survival in sub-Saharan Africa had not yet reached the level attained in 1950 in the USA. In Angola and Niger, 25 in every 100 babies born will die before the age of five years; in Europe the comparable rate is fewer than one in every 100.”
Jennifer Bryce of the World Health Organisation, the series author, said: ”Both the context has changed and we have dropped the ball, because child health was going on in the 1980s and early 1990s.
”There was the coalition for child survival and Unicef out in front making sure things happened. People were perhaps too self satisfied and stopped working for it before they finished the job.”
Unicef says it agrees with the Lancet analysis, but points out that wars and the Aids pandemic have made the job of safeguarding child health much more difficult. – Guardian Unlimited Â