AP Features, January 22nd, 2008
A newborn child in Sierra Leone has the lowest chance in the world of surviving until age 5, with the prospects almost as bad for children in Angola and Afghanistan, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.N.'s children's fund.
In 2006, nearly 9.7 million children died worldwide before reaching the age of 5, mostly from preventable causes such as diarrhea, malaria or malnutrition, UNICEF said in its annual report.
But progress has been made in a number of regions and strengthening local health services holds great promise for reducing the child mortality rate, said the 154-page document, "The State of the World's Children 2008."
More than 26,000 children under the age of 5 die each day on average.
In 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available, Sierra Leone had the highest child mortality rate, with 270 deaths per 1,000 births. Angola came second with 260 deaths per 1,000 births, followed by Afghanistan with 257 deaths per 1,000 births.
The worldwide under-5 mortality rate in 2006 was 72 deaths per 1,000 births. The average rate of industrialized countries was six deaths per 1,000 births.
"The loss of 9.7 million young lives each year is unacceptable, especially when many of these deaths are preventable," said UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman.
The deaths could be prevented by simple health care measures, such as vaccination, insecticide-treated bed nets and vitamin supplements, the report said. But the measures must be taken all together and applied in each village to reach every child, even in the remotest regions of the world, it said.
"We know exactly what works," said Angela Hawke of UNICEF, referring to strategies the agency has been promoting for some time.
"But we need to make sure that these kinds of services are integrated at the most local level, in the villages where children live," she said.
Sierra Leone which suffered an 11-year civil war from 1991 to 2002 and is one of the poorest countries in the world, is, like Angola, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions, unable to offer sufficient health services to its citizens, the report said.
Although there has been progress in many countries and the under-5 mortality rate worldwide has been reduced by 23 percent since 1990, more needs to be done. If the world is to reach the U.N. objective of decreasing the global child mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, the current rate must be cut in half within the next seven years, the report said.
Nearly all the children under 5 who die every year live in developing countries with most of the highest child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, according the report.
In East Asia and the Pacific, central and eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America and the Caribbean, child mortality has been cut roughly in half since 1990, to below 30 deaths per 1,000 births, the report said.
Nearly one-third of the 50 least developed countries, including the Maldives, East Timor, Nepal and Malawi, have reduced child mortality rates by at least 40 percent since 1990.
In Mozambique for example, the government and aid agencies trained community educators to teach the country's rural population how cheap practices such as breast-feeding, oral rehydration therapy and mosquito nets can improve children's' health. The country has seen a 41 percent drop in child mortality since 1990.
Steven Ngaujah, a nurse at Brookfields Community Hospital in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, said many parents in his community are too poor to bring young children in for checkups. When they do, hospital employees find that mothers often do not think to clean the city grime from a breast before feeding an infant, meaning even breastmilk gets contaminated by the accumulated germs and pollutants on their skin.
"When these children fall ill, instead of the mothers taking them to the nearest hospital immediately, they prefer to 'pepper doctor' (treat them at home by themselves)," said Annie Brima, a nurse in the capital.
The child mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa went down only by 14 percent since 1990, according to the report.
The data was mainly drawn from statistics and studies by the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the U.N. Populations Division.
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Associated Press Writer Clarence Roy-Macaulay in Freetown, Sierra Leone, contributed to the report.
