Will You Live to Tomorrow?

Yukari Mayer, OCU

One death in a family is often a personal tragedy. Sometimes, death is natural and expected, but sometimes, death is unnatural and senseless. This article discusses the senseless death of thousands of people every year and how we might prevent it.

According to UNICEF statistics, about 21,000 children die needlessly every day around the world. This means 1 child dies every 4 seconds, 14 children die every minute or almost 7.6 million children die every year. United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that approximately 4 million newborn infants worldwide are dying in the first month of life, and about 7.6 million children worldwide died before their 5th birthday in 2010. Actually, the number of deaths of children under five years of age worldwide has declined from more than 12 million in 1990 to 7.6 million in 2010. However this number of 7.6 million children is too far many.

About half of under-five deaths occur in only five countries; India (22%), Nigeria (11%), Democratic Republic of the Congo (6%), Pakistan (6%), China (4%). The vast majority occurs in Sub-Saharan Africa region. The situations behind a high rate of child deaths are malnutrition due to poverty, mother's poor health during childbirth, unsafe drinking water and inadequate sanitary facilities and insufficient health service. In consequence, children who have weaker immune systems than adult become a victim.

Forty percent of under-five deaths are babies who are under 1 month old with various complicating illness. This number has been increased about 10 percent since 1990. The four major killers of children under age 5 are pneumonia (18%), diarrheal diseases (15%), malaria (10%), measles (5%) and HIV (4%).

Most of those killers are preventable in developed countries.

Africa had the worst mortality rate from measles. According to World Health Organization (WHO), there were approximately 396,000 people who died of measles in 2000. However the number decreased to 36,000 in 2006. What helped to decrease the number was routine measles vaccination. Strengthening routine immunization reduced mortality of measles.

A lot of children in developing countries can be prevented those diseases by receiving immunization. To save children from preventable diseases, there need to be better healthcare services. The governments of each country should increase a budget for their healthcare services and it will decline the mortality.

UNICEF, WHO and American Red Cross have been providing healthcare services to people in developing countries. We could help them by donating money to those organizations or we could volunteer with them as well.

We live without worrying about tomorrow, but you must know there are people who worry if they are alive next day. Especially children, they should have a dream, not to have a fear of tomorrow.