An estimated 6.3 million children died before their 15th birthdays last year, or 1 every 5 seconds, mostly due to a lack of water, sanitation, nutrition and basic healthcare, a report by UN agencies released yesterday said.
The vast majority of these deaths — 5.4 million — occur in the first five years of life, with newborns accounting for about half of the deaths, the report said.
“With simple solutions like medicines, clean water, electricity and vaccines” this toll could be dramatically reduced, said Laurence Chandy, an expert with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
However, without urgent action, 56 million children under five — half of them newborns — would die from now through 2030.
Globally, last year, half of all deaths in children under five were in sub-Saharan Africa, where 1 in 13 children died before their fifth birthday.
In high-income countries, that number was 1 in 185, according to the report co-led by UNICEF, the WHO and the World Bank.
It found that most children under five die due to preventable or treatable causes, such as complications during birth, pneumonia, diarrhea, neonatal sepsis and malaria.
Among older children — aged five to 14 — injuries become a more prominent cause of death, especially from drowning and road traffic.
For children everywhere, the most precarious time is the first month of life. Last year, 2.5 million newborns died in their first month, and a baby born in sub-Saharan Africa or in Southern Asia was nine times more likely to die in the first month than one born in a high-income country.
Despite these problems, the report found that fewer children are dying each year worldwide.
The number of under-five deaths fell to 5.4 million last year from 12.6 million in 1990, while the number of deaths in five to 14 year-olds dropped to under 1 million from 1.7 million in the same period.
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