Global Health Initiatives Could Save 9 Million Lives Per Year:
Cost? Only 7% of Congressionally Funded Bailout
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President, Chance for Peace Speech, April 16, 1953
At the end of October 2008, as the cost of the US economic bailout of Wall Street spiraled upward to what is now estimated to be $7 trillion, I was trying to explain to my 4-year-old the importance of collecting pennies for UNICEF while trick-or-treating. I explained that UNICEF gives shots to kids who haven't received them
to help prevent them from getting sick. Sasha asked me "Why some kids can't get shots?" A difficult question to answer, indeed.
According to UNICEF, 25,000 children under the age of five die every day (more than 1000 deaths every hour, more than 17 deaths each minute, one child's preventable death every 4 seconds) because of a lack of basic health care: immunizations, oral rehydration therapy and zinc to prevent diarrhea, accessible and adequately stocked medical clinics. That's 9.7 million children dying each year because of the world's neglect.
In Afghanistan specifically, despite the supposed influx of resources from NATO countries, the World Health Organization reports "the health of women and children is among the worst in the world. One woman dies in Afghanistan every 27 minutes from pregnancy-related complications, 25,000 every year. Immunization coverage remains at best around 50-65%. Eighty-five thousand children under five die from diarrhea each year."
More than one in four children born in Afghanistan die before their fifth birthday. Yet despite the billions of foreign dollars being spent on military operations in Afghanistan, the total annual expenditure on health care per person is only $26, or less than $700 million in total (1/1000th of the Congressional Wall Street bailout).
Globally, millions of kids die simply because under global capitalism it isn't yet profitable to save them. Impoverished children don't have the purchasing power to make it profitable to provide these basic services, so capitalism ignores their cries and allows them to perish. Some have argued that the current acute financial crisis has illustrated that unregulated capitalism is ideologically bankrupt, and undoubtedly many have recently reached that conclusion. The chronic child health crisis in a world of plenty indicts capitalism for moral bankruptcy.
The Rehydration Project, which focuses on advocacy to prevent deaths due to diarrhea, estimates that $50 billion would be required to meet the UN's millennium development goal of reducing mortality for kids under five by two-thirds by 2015. The UN's International Health Partnership estimates that such an initiative could also save three million women's lives as well.
Let's temporarily assume for the sake of argument that the US economic bailout money will reduce the impact of a deep US and global recession*. The argument was made that the US Congress couldn't afford not to fund the bailout because the consequences of the financial crisis would be unthinkable. But by what stretch
of the moral imagination can we afford not to allocate $50 billion, less than 7% of the Congressionally approved bailout money (less than 1% of the $7 trillion total package) to fully fund basic global health care and save more than six million children's lives a year? Shouldn't it be unthinkable to deny health care to millions of dying kids while Congress fully funds both profligate Wall Street corporations and the military?
We need to reverse these priorities and transform our militarized economic system at its roots. The 2009 US Federal Budget, the War Resisters League reports, includes $965 billion in current military spending, expenditures designed to kill people or prepare to kill them. But even if these weapons rust in peace, as Eisenhower pointed out, voting for these expenditures steals the hope of millions of parents and children. Let's restore their hope.
A version of this essay originally ran as the editorial of the December 2008 - January 2009 issue of Peacework Magazine.
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UNICEF's current petition campaign to Obama calls for only a one billion dollar initiative (for five years), but it would be a start, and save an estimated three million children's lives. My comment: Don't we have a moral responsibility to save as many lives as we can? Shouldn't we, and UNICEF, be asking/demanding/organizing for more? See poll below.
Please also see additional resources to help publicize UNICEF's "Believe in Zero" awareness campaign (designed to focus attention on reducing the number of needless deaths of children every day from 25,000 to zero) on your blog, website, Facebook, MySpace, on your work-desk, etc.
According to UNICEF's 2008 annual report, global health initiatives are succeeding. Public health providers know how to save lives. We just need to provide more resources:
the number of worldwide deaths of children under five has dropped to the lowest level ever, 9.2 million per year — or more than 25,000 per day. That’s a decline of 27 percent since 1990 and of more than 60 percent since 1960 — and it shows that UNICEF’s child survival strategy is working.
Even as we argue for the large-scale reclamation of resources for global public health, we can also do our part individually. The US Fund for UNICEF, for example, has a current initiative in which all donations will be matched dollar for dollar. For each dollar we donate (download the handout: How UNICEF Makes a Little Go a Long Way), UNICEF can immunize one child against measles (80¢), provide two packets of oral rehydration salts (12¢), and provide Vitamin A capsules to prevent blindness and boost two children's immune systems for a year (6¢). Since our gifts are matched, we can multiply the effect of every gift we give by two.
If you're on a college campus, according to UNICEF,
UNICEF has partnered with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) and the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF in a nationwide fundraising challenge on campuses from September 5, 2008 to February 28, 2009. With your help, we're hoping campuses will raise $150,000 by February 28, 2009, and your fundraising efforts will then be matched, dollar for dollar, by the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.
To learn about the current food crisis in Afghanistan, please see "Afghanistan struggles with a food crisis in the harshest of seasons." We can also contribute directly to help save lives in Afghanistan.
As I asked in an essay a few years ago, "What kind of world would we help create if we began to practice the idea that each child on earth is as invaluable as the children we love most?"
* For some articles from the latest issue of
Peacework questioning this assumption, see
Democratizing the Global Financial Architecture: Redesigning Economic Regulation for Global Needs,
Responding to Main Street: A Sensible Plan for Recovery, and
Cooperative Alternatives to the Capitalist Meltdown: An Economy Based on One Person, One Vote