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| © UNICEF/ HQ06-2059/Pablo Bartholomew | |
| INDIA: Sunita cradles her malnourished daughter, who weighed just 2.2 lbs. at birth, in the UNICEF-supported Sick Newborn Care Unit at GB Pant Hospital in Port Blair, capital of the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The child also has congenital pneumonia. The 12-bed unit, which provides top-tier delivery services and offers the best chance of survival for newborns, is an essential part of UNICEF health interventions on the islands. |
We can’t do it without India and China.
That’s one assessment from UNICEF’s first-ever The State of Asia-Pacific’s Children 2008: Child Survival report, which measures regional efforts to improve child and maternal health.
Unless both countries—and India, in particular—make major strides to curb child mortality, global efforts to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals will fall short, said the 60-page report released earlier this month.
Among the 9.7 million deaths of children under age five in 2006, more than one-quarter occurred in these two countries alone. India's share was far bigger, with 2.1 million.
Those sobering stats were tempered by these heartening ones: the overall number of child deaths throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands has decreased significantly over the last several decades, dropping from 10.5 million in 1970 to about 4 million in 2006.
The report also found that robust economic growth has helped spur this welcome decline and helped lift many out of poverty, but that it has not alleviated the harsh realities still faced by hundreds of millions of children and families every day. In fact, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen in many countries. Yet another stark statistic: Children born in the poorest 20 percent of households are far more likely to die from preventable diseases than children born in the wealthiest 20 percent.
Like The State of Africa’s Children, which debuted in May, the Asia-Pacific report complements UNICEF’s flagship document, The State of the World’s Children.
Neither of these two reports has generated widespread media coverage, though the Asia-Pacific publication seems to have received more attention than its African counterpart. The BBC, Bloomberg and The Voice of America ran fairly in-depth stories.
The report cited pneumonia, diarrhea and malnutrition as the main culprits in preventable child deaths.
BACKGROUND NOTE: Pneumonia contributes to a third of all under-five deaths in the region. Incredibly, around 600,000 children’s lives could be saved each year through universal treatment of pneumonia with antibiotics alone, at a cost of about $600 million. That’s a pretty amazing return on your investment.
By far, the most critical period in a child’s life is the first month. The Asia-Pacific report emphasizes the importance of improving newborn and maternal health and of implementing a continuum of care—essential, proven interventions delivered before, during and following birth.
BACKGROUND NOTE: But major obstacles stand in the way, including yawning income, gender and ethnic disparities. It doesn’t help that the region’s spending on public health is insufficient, at best. South Asia spends only 1.1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on public health, while the rest of the Asia Pacific region allocates about 1.9 percent. By comparison, the world average is 5.1 percent.
Noting that the “opportunity to increase survival among children under five has never been better,” the report urges all governments, international agencies, non-governmental organizations and others to not take recent gains for granted but rather to “deepen and consolidate” them by expanding health services.
At the risk of being over-simplistic, I offer this analogy: If you notice 10 children drowning, do you stop and pat yourself on the back after you have rescued six? Or do you refuse to rest until all 10 have been pulled out of the water?
Let me know what you think.