WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2009-01-22 Time: 05:00:09 Posted By: Jan
By Louise Flanagan
South Africa has little chance of meeting the international targets for reducing child deaths.
A United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) report released on Thursday points out that SA has reduced the deaths by just 8 percent since 1990, far short of the UN target of a 66 percent reduction between 1990 and 2015.
Unicef called the under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) the principal indicator for measuring human development.
| ’64 000 children under the age of 5 died in SA last year’ |
At the launch of the Unicef report in Sandton on Thursday, Health Minister Barbara Hogan said there had been some progress in improving the lives of SA’s children, but more could and should be done.
She said one way of rapidly decreasing infant and maternal mortality was to strengthen the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) programme.
“I hope to release an accelerated plan to strengthen our PMTCT programme in coming weeks,” she said.
In 1990, SA’s rate was 64 deaths for every 1 000 live births. Last year, it was 59 deaths per 1 000, reported Unicef.
That means that 64 000 children under the age of 5 died in SA last year.
In the 20 years between 1970 and 1990, the death rate halved from 113 to 64, a drop of 2,8 percent each year on average. But in the 17 years since 1990 it has dropped only 8 percent, an average annual drop of 0,5 percent.
SA’s infant mortality rate (for children under the age of 1 year) is not much better – this dropped slightly from 49 per 1 000 in 1990 to 46 last year. The neonatal mortality rate (babies less than a month old) was 17 per 1 000 in 2004; no comparative statistics were reported.
By comparison, Sweden has managed to reduce its U5MR by 57 percent between 1990 and 2007 – dropping from seven to three deaths per 1 000.
Unicef rated SA as 60th from the bottom out of 194 countries for its U5MR.
The countries with the worst U5MR were Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau.
The top six countries which shared 189th place, each with a death rate of just three children per 1 000, were Sweden, Singapore, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Andorra.
Eleven of the 15 Southern African Development Community countries are ranked in the 55 countries with the worst child mortality rates. They are, from worst: Zambia, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Tanzania, Madagascar, Malawi, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Namibia.