World | Other World Stories
Biggest child-killers worldwide
Hanoi : Diarrhoea doesn't make headlines. Nor does pneumonia. Aids and malaria tend to get most of the attention.
- AP
- Published: 00:00 November 21, 2009
- Image Credit: AP
- A Palestinian child with a painted face looks on during an event organised by Unicef to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in the West Bank city of Ramallah yesterday. Investigators found that the natural process of cell ageing by which protective "caps" on the end of chromosomes, called telomeres, are worn away as humans age was accelerated among adults who had suffered trauma in childhood.
Yet even though cheap tools could prevent and cure both diseases, they kill an estimated 3.5 million kids under five each a year globally — more than HIV and malaria combined.
"They have been neglected, because donor or partnership mechanisms shifted their emphasis to HIV and Aids and other issues," said Dr Tesfaye Shiferaw, a Unicef official in Africa. "These age-old traditional killers remain with us. The ones dying are the children of the poor."
Global spending on maternal, newborn and child health was about $3.5 billion in 2006, according to a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That same year, nearly $9 billion was devoted to HIV and Aids, according to UNAids.
Pneumonia is the biggest killer of children under five, claiming more then two million lives annually or about 20 per cent of all child deaths. Aids, in contrast, accounts for about two per cent.
If identified early, pneumonia can be treated with inexpensive antibiotics. Yet Unicef and the World Health Organisation estimate less than 20 per cent of those sickened receive the drugs.
Vaccine
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A vaccine has been available since 2000 but has not yet reached many children in developing countries. The Gavi Alliance, a global partnership, hopes to introduce it to 42 countries by 2015.
Diarrhoeal diseases, such as cholera and rotavirus, kill 1.5 million kids each year, most under two years old. The children die from dehydration, weakened immune systems and malnutrition. Often they get sick from drinking dirty water.
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