Child-Killer Diseases on Decline, Unicef Reports
By PAUL LEWIS,
Published: December 21, 1993
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 20— Striking an upbeat note about its struggle to reduce infant mortality, Unicef says "a final offensive" may now be under way against the biggest killers of small children in the world.
Its annual report, titled "The State of the World's Children," says that the press tends to dwell on bad news from the third world rather than the good. The report notes that infant deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, tetanus and whooping cough are all in retreat and that severe malnutrition is being reduced despite a 20 percent rise in the number of children under 5 in the last decade.
"Though the lens of history rather than of news, what is now happening in the developing world may come to be seen as the beginning of a final offensive against some of the oldest and most common enemies of the world's children," it says. The report will be presented to President Clinton at the White House on Tuesday by Unicef's executive director, James P. Grant.
These advances are being made, the report says, because more and more developing countries are striving to meet the child health goals set by the World Summit for Children held here in 1990. By last July, 90 percent of the world's children were living in countries that had adopted or drafted national programs intended to meet the goals. These include cutting child mortality by a third by the end of the century, achieving 90 percent immunization coverage and insuring primary education for at least 80 percent of children.
Between 1983 and 1992 deaths from measles among children under 5 dropped from over 2.5 million a year to just over one million a year. In the last 10 years deaths from neonatal tetanus have been cut from just over a million a year to half that figure.
At the same time deaths from dehydration caused by diarrheal disease have fallen from over four million a year to just under three million. Since 1980 new cases of paralysis caused by polio declined from about half a million a year to an estimated 140,000 in 1992.
The central development problem facing the post-cold-war world, Unicef says, is what it calls the "P.P.E. spiral" created in many developing countries by the interaction between poverty, rapid population growth and environmental degradation. Poverty leads to high rates of infant mortality, which encourages overpopulation. This in turn leads to unsustainable human pressure on land and other natural resources, bringing even greater poverty. Reversing that spiral must be the world's top priority, Unicef says.