UN pessimistic about child development goals

NEW DELHI—The UN Children’s Fund said on Thursday the world would miss by 30 years the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting child deaths by two-thirds unless nations stepped up efforts to reduce mortality. “The fact is that at current rates of progress the child survival goal will be reached 30 years late,” United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Ann Veneman told disease experts at an international conference in New Delhi. “It would not be an overstatement to say that progress on child survival that has been made so far is simply unacceptable.”
Veneman said just seven of 60 nations with the highest under-five child mortality rate or the greatest number of child deaths were on target to reach the MDG goal set in 2000 and to be achieved by 2015. The MDG goal wants nations to reduce child mortality from 93 of every 1,000 children dying before five in 1990 to 31 in 2015. UNICEF says 39 countries, including India, have made insufficient or no progress in reaching the goal and 14 have seen increases in under-five mortality rates, including Botswana, which is facing an AIDS crisis.
It says around 1.4 million of the 10.5 million annual deaths of children under five across the world can be prevented by vaccination against diseases like measles and tetanus. Veneman told a meeting of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, an alliance of public and private groups committed to widespread vaccination of children — said another 1.1 children could be saved once vaccines against pneumonia and rotavirus became widely available in developing nations.—Agencies