UNICEF targets deadly diarrhoea, pneumonia in poor kids

(June 08, 2012) Concerted efforts to control diarrhoea and pneumonia, the biggest killers of children under the age of five, could save the lives of up to 2 million of the world's poorest children each year, the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, said on Friday. The lives saved would be largely in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, according to a new study from the Fund. "Scaling up simple interventions could overcome two of the biggest obstacles to increasing child survival and help give every child a fair chance to grow and thrive," said Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF. The study called for coherent and reliable distribution plans for new vaccines against the major causes of pneumonia and diarrhoea - including the influenza virus, rotavirus and pneumococcal bacteria. It noted that one of the simplest and most effective ways to protect babies from disease is exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of life, although fewer than 40 percent of infants receive such protection. "Infants not breastfed are 15 times more likely to die due to pneumonia than are exclusively breastfed children," it noted. Pneumonia and diarrhoea, which often occur simultaneously, account for 29 percent of deaths among children under five worldwide - or more than 2 million a year. Nearly 90 percent of the children who die from the two diseases live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the report said. It noted that about half of those deaths occur in just five mostly poor and populous countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and Ethiopia.