PARIS - SINGAPORE is ranked first in the world for the lowest
estimated rates of children under five who die each year for 2010,
followed by Iceland, Sweden, Cyprus and Luxembourg.
In the United States - whose ranking has dropped from 20th to 42
since 1970 - the mortality rate is nearly double the European
average. But the proportion of under-five children who die each
year across the globe has dropped 60 per cent over the past four
decades, according to a study published Monday.
In the last 20 years this salutary decline has accelerated, with
the number of deaths among newborns, infants and one-to-four year
olds falling from 11.9 million to an estimated 7.7 million in 2010,
the new figures show.
That remains a staggeringly large number of young lives lost,
many to preventable diseases and overwhelmingly in the world's
poorest nations. A child born today in Chad, Mali or Nigeria is
nearly sixty times less likely to see her or his fifth birthday
than one born in Scandinavia. And progress still falls short of the
trajectory needed to meet the UN's Millennium Development goal of
slashing child deaths globally by 66 per cent between 1990 and
2015.
But the decline in under-five mortality is still an encouraging
achievement, and suggests further progress is possible, the report
says. Even at the current rate of improvement, there are 31
countries on pace to meet the UN benchmark for 2015, including
Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia and Egypt.
All told, 54 of the 187 nations examined in the study are poised
to reach the goal. In 1970 there were more than 200 under-five
deaths for every 1,000 live births, the measure used to rank
nations in this grim index. By 1990, that list had dwindled to 12,
and today no country crosses the 200-death threshold, according to
the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet.
'One of the biggest achievements of the past 20 years has been
this incredible progress in countries that historically have had
the highest child mortality in the world,' said Christopher Murray,
Director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and co-author of the study.
--AFP