“Global child mortality equates to the 2004 Asian tsunami striking every 40 days and killing only children – nearly all of them among the poorest of our world’s 6.5 billion people,” writes Bill Frist in the forward to Save the Children’s 2008 State of the World’s Mothers Report, released this week.
Among the key findings of the report is that more than 200 million children under the age of 5 lack basic health care. Nor surprisingly, the poorest children are the least likely to receive lifesaving health care and, thus more likely to die. And die they do: more than 26,000 children around the world die every day because they lack basic health care.
The report contains a number of recommendations for closing health care coverage gaps, including designing health care programs that better target the poor and most marginalized, investment in community health workers and delivery of a basic package of maternal, newborn and childhealth care. The report also calls governments to increase their commitments to the effort to provide basic health care to the poorest children, especially in developing countries. As Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children obesrved upon issuing the report: “A child’s chance of celebrating a fifth birthday should not largely depend on the country or community where he or she is born.”
The full report is available here. A fuller summary is also provided in the news release for the report, which can be found here.
Tags: Anti-poverty strategies, Health