The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has declined by more then 25 percent since 1990.
And the bad news...
The good news: The global child mortality rate of children five years old and younger has declined by more than a quarter in the last two decades — to 65 per 1,000 live births last year from 90 in 1990.
The bad news: Almost nine million children died before their fifth birthday last year in 2008.
So from a big picture (and of course, an ‘individual picture’ point of view), the data released by UNICEF last week is of course good news.
“That’s 10,000 less children dying per day,” said UNICEF's executive director, Anne M. Veneman. And while the NY Times put this story on page three, page one might have been more appropriate, at least as a continuing wake-up call/reality check in the daily distraction of our lives.
As an awareness exercise, look at it this way. Using an average of 10 million children dying each year, (which is a very conservative number, as the mortality rate in 1990 was 12.5 million), this means if you’re now thirty years old, three hundred million children have died since the day you were born. If you’re 45, the number is almost a half billion.
So, while these new numbers appear to show progress, as there are over three-million children last year who are alive, and wouldn’t have survived had they been born in 1990, the overall mortality rate numbers remain both stunning and also mind numbing at the same time.
And for additional perspective amid the national politics of today, and the false, distorted claims of the right re healthcare reform…In the U.S. the mortality rate is 7.8 children per 1000 live births.
In Sweden, the rate is 4.0
Anyway I'll end here, as the point of this posting is really to
just bring attention to the numbers. The details are worth
reading and can be found via the below links.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
http://www.unicef.org/...