For Health of Young People, a Mixed Picture

This is the VOA Special English Development Report.UNICEF says the death rate for children under the age of five has fallen twenty-eight percent since nineteen ninety. Experts credit the drop to improvements in public health measures. These include vaccination campaigns and the use of bed nets chemically treated to kill mosquitoes that spread malaria.

Still, Brian Hansford at the United Nations Children's Fund says more work remains. He says the good news is that the rate of deaths of children under five years of age continued to decrease in two thousand eight. The number of child deaths decreased to an estimated eight-point-eight millionfrom twelve-point-five million in nineteen ninety.

Compared to nineteen ninety, ten thousand fewer children are dying each day. The bad news is that
a yearly death total of eight-point-eight million is still a tragedy, and so there is still much to do.

One of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals is to reduce the under-five death rate by two-thirds by two thousand fifteen. One country that could reach this goal is Malawi. In nineteen ninety, there were two hundred twenty-five deaths for every one thousand live births. The estimate for last year was one hundred deaths.

UNICEF spokesman Brian Hansford says pneumonia and diarrhea remain the world's two greatest killers of young children. Ninety-three percent of the deaths happen in Africa and Asia.

A separate new study looked at deaths worldwide in young people age ten to twenty-four. It found that ninety-seven percent happen in lowand middle income countries. And two out of every five are the result of injuries and violence.

Professor George Patton at Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, was the lead author. The study found that worldwide, more than two and a half million people age ten to twenty-four died intwo thousand four. Nearly two-thirds were in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Conditions related to pregnancy and childbirth were a leading cause of deaths in females. But for both sexes combined, the leading killer in this age group was traffic accidents.

Ten percent of all the deaths wereblamed on road injuries.Next came suicide and violence.
Also in the top ten causes were infections, including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, as well as drowning and fire-related deaths. The study appears in the journal The Lancet.

And that's the VOA Special English Development Report.

(Adapted from aradio program broadcast 28Sep2009)