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Around 5.2 million children died before the age of five in 2019, just over 14,000 each day, and the vast majority of them from diseases that could easily have been prevented or treated, UN figures show.
Although the number is staggeringly high, it is much lower than a few decades ago. In 1990 12.5 million children under the age of five died, more than 34,000 a day.
While in 1990 there were 93 infant deaths for every 1,000 births in the world, the number fell to 76 ten years later and last year to 38. This is a decrease of almost 60 percent, but still a newborn dies every 13 seconds.
More and more people are growing
However, large vaccination campaigns and the treatment of birth complications and diseases such as malaria and pneumonia have saved millions of lives.
– The fact that more children than ever in history are living to live their first anniversary shows what is achieved when the world makes health and well-being the first priority, says the leader of the World Health Organization (WHO ), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Now, he and others fear that the corona pandemic will reverse positive development and point out, among other things, that the health care system in many countries is on the verge of collapse.
Can be prevented
– The global community has gone too far in the work of eradicating preventable child deaths to allow the COVID-19 pandemic to stop us, says UNICEF leader Henrietta Fore.
– When children are denied access to health services because the system is congested, and when women for fear of infection are afraid of giving birth in hospital, they are also victims of covid-19, he says.
– Without immediate investment in congested health services, millions of children under the age of five, especially newborns, will die, Fore warns.
Most in Africa
More than half of all child deaths occurred last year in sub-Saharan Africa, while 28 percent occurred in central and southern Asia, according to a report by UNICEF, the WHO, the World Bank and the United Nations Population Fund. United.
In countries like Nigeria, Somalia, Chad, and the Central African Republic, more than one in ten children die before the age of five, and the situation is almost as bad in countries like South Sudan, Mali and Burkina Faso.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, one in seventeen children died before the age of five last year, and even there, the UN now fears that the corona pandemic will drastically worsen the situation.
Johns Hopkins University in the US estimated in May that the pandemic would require the lives of nearly 6,000 more children a day, and since then the spread of the infection has accelerated in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
