United Nations aims to end ‘childhood deaths’

Bid to save lives from diarrhoea, pneumonia

GENEVA, April 13, (AFP): The United Nations launched a plan Friday aimed at all but eradicating childhood deaths from diarrhoea and pneumonia by 2025, in a bid to save the lives of some two million children every year.

The UN’s agencies for health and children said they were joining forces with governments and other bodies to use existing low-cost methods to take on two diseases that are the leading killer of children under the age of five.

“We often call them silent killers because they don’t make the news, (but they constitute) a daily emergency for children,” Marilena Viviani, UNICEF’s associate director, said in Geneva ahead of the launch.

Pneumonia and diarrhoea together account for 29 percent of all deaths in children under the age of five, killing some two million a year, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

The diseases are closely linked to poverty, hitting children with the least access to clean water and sanitation and who are the least likely to have received vaccines that could protect them, said Viviani.

In 2011, around 711,000 cases of diarrhoea among under-fives proved fatal, a fall of 11.1 percent over the previous year, according to research published in The Lancet to coincide with the launch of the Global Action Plan.

There were some 1.25 million cases of fatal pneumonia in 2011, a decline of 10 percent over 2010.

Nearly 90 percent of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths in children occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.