WHO wants action to stop millions of child deaths
Date: 08-Apr-03
Country: SWITZERLAND
Simple measures to improve habitats where children live, learn and play could prevent the acute respiratory infections, malaria and diarrhoea which are major killers of children worldwide, the WHO said yesterday.
"The biggest threats to children's health lurk in the very places that should be safest - home, school and community," WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said in a statement to mark World Health Day, this year dedicated to ensuring healthy environments for children.
The United Nations health agency estimates that children under five comprise only 10 percent of the world population but account for 40 percent of global illness. As much as one third of these illnesses may be caused by environmental factors.
Indoor air pollution, caused by the use of dirty household fuels that lead to acute respiratory infections, is the top killer resulting in around two million deaths among children under the age of five each year.
Inadequate access to safe drinking water and poor sanitation often results in diarrhoea which claims around 1.3 million children's lives every year, while malaria kills around one million, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Improving ventilation and cooking stoves, ensuring safe sanitary facilities and water storage and screening doors and windows against mosquitoes were just a handful of the simple and inexpensive suggestions put forward.
However UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, said there also needed to be a greater focus on protecting children from abuse, violence and neglect - hazards that it believes are often overlooked in public health planning.
Around 11 million children die before their fifth birthday, overwhelmingly from causes that are preventable and treatable. UNICEF said. Millions have died or been injured in conflicts in the last decade and 180 million are engaged in child labour.
"Children have the right to an environment that safeguards them not only against disease, but against ill-treatment," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy.
