WUNRN
WUNRN would be interested in gender
dissagregation of the data in this Report,
for such reasons as female
infanticide and preference for boys.
Direct Link to Full 24-Page UN
Report:
http://www.unicef.org/media/files/Child_Mortality_Report_2011_Final.pdf
UN News Centre
SUBSTANTIAL DROP IN CHILD MORTALITY
AROUND THE WORLD - UN
15 September 2011 – The
number of young children who die each day has plunged over the past two
decades, new United Nations figures
show, but the world is still lagging far behind in efforts to achieve its
target for reducing child mortality.
The latest estimates, issued by the UN
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN
World Health Organization (WHO),
indicate that the number of children under the age of five who perish each year
fell from more than 12 million in 1990 to about 7.6 million last year.
That decrease means about 12,000 fewer children are dying each
day than they were two decades earlier.
Greater access to health care, particularly in remote areas,
broader immunization coverage and higher-quality care in many countries are
among the factors being cited for the improvement.
Child mortality rates are dropping in every region of the world,
including the area with the highest number of under-five fatalities,
sub-Saharan
Success stories include
“Focusing greater investment on the most disadvantaged
communities will help us save more children’s lives, more quickly and more cost
effectively,” he added.
In the past two decades the under-five mortality rate dropped by
more than a third – from 88 deaths per every 1,000 live births to 57 deaths.
Yet that is well short of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG), agreed to by
world leaders at a UN summit in 2000, for child mortality rates to fall by two
thirds by 2015.
Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO, called for increased
investment in children’s health in the years ahead, as well as greater efforts
to boost nutrition, immunization coverage, water and sanitation.
Ian Pett, UNICEF’s chief of health systems and strategic
planning, told the UN News Centre that a combination of factors – such as
integrated immunization schemes that ensured children received multiple
vaccinations – rather than any one single factor had led to the steep
improvement.
He said many countries had taken different paths to record
similar improvements:
Neonatal sepsis, pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria remain the
biggest killers, although death rates from malaria have fallen in recent years.
Tessa Wardlaw, the chief of the agency’s statistics and
monitoring section, noted that about half of all deaths last year of children
under the age of five occurred in just five countries:
Today’s estimates have been prepared by a UN inter-agency group
that comprises UNICEF, the WHO, the World Bank and the UN Population Division.