Posted by Rachel on: 12.05.2007 /
Child Death Rate Drops
Worldwide, the number of children who died in 2006 dropped below 10 million for the first time. UNICEF attributes the decrease to measles vaccinations, mosquito nets, and breast-feeding. However, experts said most of the 9.7 million deaths were preventable - much more still needs to be done.
Source: World Vision News
Leave a Reply
Comment by: Eliza
1 12/6/07 12:12 AM | Comment Link |10 million still sounds like such a huge number - !
Rachel, do you know how much of a drop this is? What was the highest number since they’ve been counting? And did they give a breakdown of the top few causes of the 9.7 million deaths they considered preventable?
Comment by: Rachel
2 12/6/07 3:05 PM | Comment Link |Eliza, all they had in this particular issue of the newsletter was the info I reproduced above. It was just a little box in the margin next to a larger article. But you have great questions and I will do more research on that and get back to you.
Comment by: David H
3 12/6/07 7:35 PM | Comment Link |From childinfo.org, which uses Unicef reports:
Reports providing info on various aspects of child and infant mortality can be found here. Unicef does not appear to make a big deal out of the specific diseases. They seem to focus primarily on the causes, for which there are usually more than one contributing to the mortality rate (low birth weight and ongoing malnutrition as contributing causes to a death caused by diarrhea that resulted from poor sanitation and lack of clean drinking water).
As a former newspaper reporter I went right to the executive summary expecting to find figures such as those I quoted. They are not in the 2007 report as far as I could tell. Not sure if that is on purpose or not.
Hope this helps.
Comment by: Eliza
4 12/6/07 10:52 PM | Comment Link |Thanks for that information, Dave!
Interesting that the UNICEF site suggests “antibiotics for acute respiratory infections” - I wonder what this means in practice, in developing countries - most of those infections are viral, & in the US (& other countries?) the over-prescription of antibiotics for viral respiratory conditions, for which they have no efficacy, has been a factor contributing to the evolution of bacteria with resistance to antibiotics.
Also, this discussion reminds me: I had an interesting conversation recently with a Peace Corps volunteer just back from Western Africa, who worked on public health projects while she was there (including figuring out what the people in the village needed - and what they wanted - and trying to work within their societal structure, rather than imposing her Western ideas upon them - that sounded hardest!). Anyway, she said that when she got there, she noticed that the village had latrines which they used as toilets & also as washing areas, and the liquid from the latrines drained into big puddles in the streets, & the kids would play in those puddles. (Sounds quite gross to a Westerner, but apparently was quite appealing for the kids, hey mud is mud the world ’round!) Not only were the kids exposed to fecal bacteria through those pools, the pools were also breeding grounds for mosquitoes. So, she worked with the village elders & gathered a team of villagers & collected their wisdom about construction, and together they built something like 35 drainage pits, deep & full of rocks & gravel, to collect the runoff. Sounds like a big step in a good direction for the kids of that village, but also somewhat disheartening to think of how many such steps, of different types, it would take to make a dent in the figure of 10 million.
Comment by: Rachel
5 12/8/07 11:52 AM | Comment Link |Thanks for the information, David & Eliza!