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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Children's Ability to Describe Past Event Develops Over Time

In the first study to examine how children talk about the time-related features of their experiences--when, how often, in what order events occur--researchers have found intriguing changes as children grow older. The study’s findings may have implications for understanding these aspects of cognitive development as well as for questioning child witnesses and victims.
The study was conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the University of Cambridge. It appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers analyzed forensic interviews of 250 four- to 10-year-old children who were alleged victims of sexual abuse, focusing on the kinds of references to time they made when describing these real-life events.

The children made increasing numbers of references to time-related characteristics of experienced events as they grew older, the researchers found. However, witnesses under 10 seldom mentioned specific times or dates, or what happened before reported events or actions. There were dramatic increases to such references at the age of 10.

References to the sequence of events or parts of events were most common, and their increase with age may be related to children’s developing capability to elaborate. Children were more likely to mention time spontaneously when asked to recall what happened than when they were asked specific recognition questions. This is pertinent because information retrieved from memory by recall is much more likely to be accurate than information retrieved in response to questions that ask children to select among options offered by the interviewer (such as “Did he …"” or “Was it x or y"”).

The children remembered the times of past events by making references to clock times, events that occurred in the same time frame, or the calendar, the researchers found. While older children were capable of using both short- and long-scale time patterns (such as time of day and day of the month), younger children mostly referred to short-scale time patterns (such as time of day), or they anchored the events to familiar activities (such as “when I returned from school”).

These findings have important implications for forensic interviews, where the ability to provide information about the number of incidents, the time of occurrences, and the sequence of events may allow suspected victims and witnesses to define specific episodes of allegedly experienced crimes. This ability increases children’s competence as witnesses and the prospect that their cases will be pursued in the criminal justice system. In addition, awareness that children acquire some temporal skills late in their development may discourage attempts to discredit child witnesses when they fail to provide the requested time-related information.

“By helping forensic interviewers to recognize children’s capabilities and limitations, our findings may also encourage interviewers to seek essential temporal information using age-appropriate techniques,” according to Yael Orbach, staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the study’s lead author.

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Early Behavior Problems Appear to Lead to Peer Rejection, Friendlessness

Behavior problems in the early grades appear to lead to peer rejection and a lack of friends in elementary school. This, in turn, can lead to early adolescent depression and loneliness.

Those are the findings of a new study by researchers at the Universities of Montreal and Oslo; the study is published in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

Researchers collected information from 551 children beginning when the children were 6 years old and continuing annually until they were 13. They also collected information from the children’s teachers, mothers, and peers.

Specifically, teachers and mothers described the children’s levels of anxiety (including a tendency to prefer solitary play and to fear new situations) and their disruptiveness (including physical aggression and hyperactivity) when the children were 6 and 7. Classroom peers reported on the children they liked most and least each year from ages 8 to 11. Children reported how many friends they had each year from ages 8 to 11, as well as their own levels of depression, loneliness, and involvement with delinquent behaviors at ages 12 and 13.

The researchers found that children who were disruptive in early childhood were more likely to be rejected and lack friends in elementary school. Anxious children also tended to have few friends, although they were not more likely to be rejected by their peers.

The study also found that rejection contributes to the risk that children won’t have friends. Children who are rejected early in elementary school are more likely to lack friends later in elementary school.

Both rejection and a lack of friends in elementary school put children at risk for adjustment problems in adolescence, the researchers found. Specifically, children who are rejected in elementary school are more likely to be lonely as adolescents, while children who lack friends in the early grades—a critical time for the development of close, reciprocal relationships—are more likely to be lonely and depressed as teenagers. In contrast, rejection and a lack of friends don’t put children at risk for delinquency—only early disruptiveness does that.

“The study’s findings indicate that the developmental consequences of risky peer relations are not limited to childhood,” according to Sara Pedersen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal’s Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment and lead author of the study. “These results suggest that interventions to prevent adolescent depression and loneliness should target elementary school peer relationships. The results also reveal that interventions targeting only childhood rejection and friendlessness are unlikely to prevent later delinquency.”

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Study of China One-Child Policy Reveals Complexity, Effectiveness

In what is being called the first systematic examination of China’s fertility policy and practice reveals that, despite government exemptions in rural areas, 63 percent of Chinese couples are strictly limited to one child. Furthermore, the policy has proven remarkably effective, with actual birth rates decreasing nearly to the mandated levels.

The study, which involved researchers in the United States and China, is the first to use data on fertility policy and population growth collected from 420 Chinese prefectures (districts comparable to U.S. counties).

“We want to clear up confusion about the one-child policy,” says Wang Feng, sociology professor at University of California Irvine and a lead author of the study. “Despite what some say, the policy has not been ‘relaxed’ over the years.”

Published in the current issue of the journal Population and Development Review, the study reveals the complexity of the one-child policy. For example, it details the kinds of exceptions within prefectures for couples who give birth to a girl first, and for parents who themselves come from a one-child family.

“The system of exemptions resembles the American tax code in its complexity,” Wang says. “But this does not change the fact that the one-child policy applies without exception to a significant majority of Chinese couples.”

China’s average mandated fertility rate, accounting for the variety of exceptions across the country, is 1.47 children per couple, Wang and his collaborators find, and their analysis of census data shows the actual fertility rate is about 1.5 children per couple.

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Foundation Announces $500 Million Commitment to Reverse Childhood Obesity in U.S.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) today announced it will commit at least $500 million over the next five years to tackle one of the most urgent public health threats facing the United States: childhood obesity. This is the largest commitment by any foundation to this issue, RWJF says. The foundation's goal is to reverse the epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States by 2015.

During the past four decades, obesity rates have soared among all age groups, more than quadrupling among children ages 6 to 11. Today, more than 33 percent of children and adolescents -- approximately 25 million kids -- are overweight or obese.

Preventing obesity during childhood is critical, because habits that last into adulthood frequently are formed during youth. Research shows that overweight adolescents have up to an 80 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults. Earlier onset of obesity leads to the earlier onset of related illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer.

In addition to the toll on U.S. health, obesity also poses a tremendous financial threat to the U.S. economy and health care system. It's estimated that the obesity epidemic costs the United States $117 billion per year in direct health care costs and lost productivity. Childhood obesity alone carries a huge price tag -- up to $14 billion per year in direct healthcare costs to treat kids.

"This is an all-American crisis," says Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., president and CEO of RWJF. "It affects all Americans, and it will require all of America working together to turn it around. Our commitment is a call to action for families, schools, government, industry, healthcare and philanthropy. To reverse the obesity epidemic and create a culture of health, we must provide families with better access to healthy choices."

The foundation says it will focus on improving access to affordable healthy foods and opportunities for safe physical activity in schools and communities. It will place special emphasis on reaching children at greatest risk for obesity and related health problems: African-American, Latino, Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islander children living in low-income communities.

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