New York - Helped by modern health care services, child deaths have dropped to a record low, to 9.7 million from the annual 13 million deaths in 1990, the UN Children's Fund said Thursday in a new survey. "This is a historic moment," said UNICEF director Ann Veneman, a former US secretary of agriculture. "More children are surviving today than ever before.
Veneman called for spreading more public health success to prevent deaths of children under five years of age to achieve the goal of halving child mortality by 2015, which is one of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
To reach the MDGs, UNICEF plans to deploy more efforts to cut child deaths by 5.4 million by 2015.
UNICEF compiled the survey drawing on national data sources. Findings reinforced reports of progress published earlier this year that the fight against measles has reduced child mortality by 60 per cent worldwide and 75 per cent in the sub-Saharan region.
It said Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics and countries in the Asia/Pacific region have succeeded in bringing down the number of child deaths.
It said of the current annual 9.7 million child deaths, 3.1 million were from South Asia and 4.8 from sub-Saharan countries.
