Child Deaths Fall Below 10 Million For First Time

Global child deaths have reached a record low, falling below 10 million per year to 9.7 million, down from almost 13 million in 1990, according to UNICEF.

"This is an historic moment," says UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman. "Now we must build on this public health success to push for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals."

Among these goals, which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, is a commitment to a two-thirds reduction in child mortality between 1990 and 2015, a result which would save an additional 5.4 million children by 2015.

However, Veneman points out that there is no room for complacency. "The loss of 9.7 million young lives each year is unacceptable. Most of these deaths are preventable and, as recent progress shows, the solutions are tried and tested. We know that lives can be saved when children have access to integrated, community-based health services."

Twenty-five years ago, UNICEF envisioned and launched its "Child Survival and Development Revolution" aimed at sharply reducing childhood death, disease and disability in the developing world. UNICEF insisted that simple, low cost interventions such as immunization, exclusive breastfeeding and growth monitoring, when taken to mass scale, could yield dramatic gains for child survival.

This first-of-its-kind effort was highly controversial within and outside of the organization. Critics argued it was naive, impossible and too simplistic. UNICEF pushed ahead, enlisting the support of hundreds of NGOs, individuals, governments and others in the "revolution." As a result of these partnerships and years of quiet effort, children today are more than twice as likely to survive past the age of five than they were 40 years ago.

"Thanks in large part to many outstanding partnerships and the extraordinary compassion and support of the American public, more children are surviving today than ever before," says U.S. Fund for UNICEF President and CEO Caryl Stern. "UNICEF's relentless focus on saving children's lives will continue until we reach the day when no mother has to grieve the loss of her baby to malaria, diarrhea, measles, or pneumonia."

The new figures are drawn from a range of national data sources, including two sets of household surveys, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and the Demographic Household Surveys (DHS). The current round of MICS surveys was conducted in over 50 countries in 2005-06 and, together with the USAID- supported Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), are the largest single source of information of the Millennium Development Goals and form the basis of the assessment of progress in child survival.

Their findings reinforce reports of progress released earlier this year on measles mortality, with a 60 per cent fall in measles deaths since 1999, and a 75 per cent reduction in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rapid declines in under-five mortality have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS) and East Asia and the Pacific.

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