$1.23 Per Person Could Save Six Million Children Each Year - Study
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WASHINGTON, D.C., Jun 27 (OneWorld) - Six million children could be spared death from preventable diseases if the world's poorest countries spent just an extra $1.23 per person on immunizations and other basic healthcare, according to health researchers.
''The cost is affordable for governments of even the poorest nations, if outside donors provide funds to build up the health systems of these countries,'' said the authors of the report appearing in the current issue of the medical journal The Lancet. It would cost some $5.1 billion per year to provide vaccines, drugs, and vitamins and to promote breastfeeding in the 42 countries that account for 90 percent of deaths among children younger than five years. Such relatively simple measures could prevent six million deaths per year from causes such as diarrhea, malnutrition, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, the same researchers had said in a 2003 study. The latest report by the team lead by Robert Black of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health puts a price tag on saving those lives. That price ''is about six percent of expenditures for tobacco products in the USA for 2003'' and compares with $12-20 billion committed annually to fighting HIV/AIDS, said Jennifer Bryce, the report's lead writer. ''$5 billion is affordable and reflects a choice being made by policy makers and donors--a choice that allows six million children to die each year, over 16,000 each day,'' Bryce added. The estimate reflects the cost of providing services to all people, Bryce said. It does not include the cost of expanding healthcare to achieve universal coverage in the first place. The Lancet, in an accompanying editorial, said the report showed that relatively little money is needed to achieve a U.N. target of reducing the death rate among under-fives to one-third its 1990 level by 2015. ''These estimates provide compelling evidence, in absolute or comparative terms, of the affordable target required to achieve the Millennium Development Goal for child health by 2015,'' the journal said, ''and also a sobering reminder of how little a life costs in some parts of the world.'' That goal is to be a subject of major U.N. talks scheduled for September. The lack of money is only one barrier to saving the lives of vulnerable children, health economist Barbara McPake of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said in an accompanying commentary. Greater political priority needs to be placed on providing basic health services and the delivery of those services needs to be made more efficient. Even so, ''it is unquestionably a shameful indictment of our global society that when known effective interventions have been developed and could be financed at a cost of this order, millions of children are denied access to them,'' said McPake. Of the six million children who die every year from preventable illnesses before reaching their fifth birthday, about half are in six countries: China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan, said the researchers. In March, The Lancet published a study showing that three million newborns who die each year could be saved with low-tech and low-cost measures but are condemned because funding and research is devoted to high-tech solutions used by the rich. Every year, four million babies die in the first month of life, researchers said. That amounts to more than 10,000 neonatal deaths per day; 99 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries. ''Yet most research, publications, and funding focus on high-tech care for the one percent of deaths that occur in rich countries,'' the March study said. Measures to prevent three in four of the deaths among newborns are startlingly simple and cheap, researchers said. They range from tetanus immunization--involving two 20-cent injections--during pregnancy to exclusive breastfeeding, clean delivery, and antibiotics to treat illness. Many of the measures also would help save some of the 515,000 mothers who die during or soon after childbirth every year, help prevent some of the four million annual stillbirths, and boost survival rates for children under five years of age, the study added. |
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