South Africa faces a massive task in reaching the Millennium Development Goals for child survival in 2015, with trends showing that the mortality rates of infants and children under the age of five were increasing rather than decreasing.
”Currently, the prospect of having to reduce the child-death figures … by two-thirds by 2015 seems dismal,” read a fact sheet distributed on Wednesday at a two-day conference, hosted by the Children’s Institute.
Aiming to take the child-survival agenda forward, the institute’s Kashifa Abrahams said child survival in South Africa warranted urgent attention and she proposed an annual inquiry.
”The idea of the Parliamentary inquiry is one of many mechanisms to take the agenda forward on child survival. We would be lobbying Parliament for an annual inquiry into child survival and hope they will agree to this, as their core function is about oversight,” Abrahams said.
She stressed that the inquiry would be an opportunity to review the current status and look at what needed to be done to enhance the prospects of survival of all children in an integrated manner.
David Bourne of the University of Cape Town’s school of public health attributed the reversal, in the mid-Nineties, of a downward trend in infant- and children-under-five mortality rates to HIV/Aids.
So, for example, in the mid-Nineties when about 40 deaths were recorded for every 1 000 live births, now the figure hovered closer to the 60 mark for infants, and 90 out of 1 000 for under fives.
Conceding there were no absolute figures on the number of HIV/Aids deaths, Bourne said one of the major areas of intervention showing success was the prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission programmes.
”[However], this seems to have fallen off the agenda,” said Bourne.
He said HIV/Aids and other causes of death, such as diarrhoea, malnutrition and respiratory infection, were ”amenable to prevention”.
According to the South African Medical Research Council’s National Burden of Disease Study for 2000, ten children under the age of five died from a preventable condition every hour.
Dr Anupam Garrib, attached to the Nelson Mandela school of medicine in KwaZulu-Natal, said the country’s infant- and children-mortality rates were ”very high”.
”[It is] very high for a country that has the resources that we have.”
Presenting data from rural KwaZulu-Natal, Garrib said the figures reinforced the notion that the country’s mortality figures were unacceptably high. — Sapa