Targets by 2015: Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Millions of children are dying needlessly.

Malaria kills a child somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.

Disease is a cruelly potent child killer, especially when combined with the poverty in which much of the developing world lives. In the absence of good nutrition, sanitation and health care, HIV/AIDS, malaria, measles, polio and tuberculosis mean certain end to millions of children who would survive and flourish elsewhere.

 

 

AIDS alone has taken more than 20 million lives and may take millions more if trends continue. Roughly 500,000 children younger than 15 years died of the disease last year alone, and children accounted for 13 percent of new infections in 2004 (640,000 cases). And mothers and pregnant women are ill; as of November 2004, women accounted for nearly 50 per cent of the more than 37 million people living with HIV worldwide and for 60 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

The pandemic hits all sectors of society in a cycle of illness and wasted lives; ill parents are unable to work and support the family, children drop out of school to help, orphans fall prey to violence, disease and, perhaps later, HIV/AIDS; a poverty-stricken country is even less able to support its citizens.

Yet directly, malaria is proportionally an even more vicious killer of children under five, responsible for 10 per cent of child mortality in the developing world. Contracted during a pregnancy, it can seriously affect the size and development of a newborn. It keeps children from attending school and adults from working. It costs Africa some $10 billion to 12 billion every year in lost gross domestic product.

In urgent response to this grim situation, in the year 2000 African countries committed themselves to a series of malaria control targets to be reached by the end of 2005, chiefly protection through the use of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) for 60 per cent of people at highest risk and intermittent preventive treatment for 60 per cent of pregnant women.

Other diseases claim large numbers of small victims. Malnutrition and AIDS are contributing to an increase in tuberculosis cases, which now affects some 250,000 children. Outbreaks of polio and cholera require fast, experienced action in some of the world’s most hard-to-reach areas.

Over the decades research and experience has clearly shown what needs to be done, what works and what doesn’t. There are measures that are proven to work and to be cost-effective, including micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, breastfeeding and interventions to improve basic health care. These are the backbone of UNICEF’s advocacy and activities to help defeat disease and achieve Millennium Goal 6 – and Goal 4, child survival, as well.

Source: UNICEF