Jessica Maw, November 6th 2008, 11:15am
There has been an increase in the number of children dying in Kenya before their fifth birthday in the past ten years. The figures are incredibly high with one in nine children dying before their fifth birthday. In 1990 the death rate per 1,000 children was 97 but that risen to 121 per 1,000 children now. The reason why they believe there has been an increase is due to a shortage of skilled workers and a lack of access to referral facilities.
They have named some direct causes of the high neonatal deaths which is death between 0 and 27 days after birth. UNICEF believes these deaths are from infection, pre-term birth, low birth weight and birth asphyxia. Another shocking figure from then UN World Health Organisation (WHO) is that 10 million children under five die every year with 30% percent of those deaths being related to malnutrition.
According to UNICEF these children are dying because families do not have access to simple low cost and highly effective interventions. These include exclusive breast-feeding; prompt treatment of malaria and pneumonia, immunisation and prevention of mother to child HIV infection.
Another cause of young deaths is Malaria which takes the lives of 90 under five children daily in Kenya. Malaria is a cause of low birth weight babies and has been the cause in 25,000 births. Another source of these shocking figures is maternal neo-natal tetanus which also continues to remain elusive. The immunisation for tetanus has decreased from 82% in 1996 to 59% in 2003.
These figures are all shocking and the causes of childhood deaths are not because of the lack of knowledge to prevent these deaths. The world knows that these deaths can be prevented so more needs to be done to prevent such a large number of children dying.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81162
3 comments:
The truth of the matter is there is little that can be done without someone seeing the opportunistic chance of profit. However, I am not in any way advocating pesssimism or defeatism. We ought to do something, but we should exercise caution in our approach. Especially in Africa where conflict and corruption are rampant, we need to keep the focus on who really needs our help and deserves our pity.
This is really sad and I wish there was somthing that can be done about it and work. But like he said we have to be cautious with the way we go about it.
I think its very sad so many childrn in Kenya are dying before their 5th birthday. There needs to be better prevention methods in place to stop these children from dying.
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