Bucking world trends, Africa's child death rate is rising

More infants die in sub-Saharan Africa now than a decade ago, largely because HIV/Aids has reversed advances in public health, the UN children's agency Unicef reports today.

One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa dies before the age of five, compared with one in 29 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and one in 143 in industrialised countries.

Globally, the under-five death rate will fall by a quarter by 2015 at current rates, significantly undershooting the UN's millennium development target of two-thirds.

Unicef said that even this "alarmingly slow progress" had bypassed southern Africa, Iraq and countries of the former Soviet Union.

"The most disturbing findings are those countries whose annual rate of progress has been negative; in other words, they are heading in reverse, with rising child mortality rates," it added.

In the early 1990s sub-Saharan Africa seemed to be closing the gap, thanks to improved healthcare, but HIV/Aids wiped out those gains, and the number of infant deaths is expected to continue rising steeply. The other main causes are malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and measles.

"It is incredible that in an age of technological and medical marvels, child survival is so tenuous in so many places, especially for the poor and marginalised. We can do better than this," said Unicef's executive director, Carol Bellamy.

"The world has the tools to improve child survival, if only it would use them. Vaccines, micronutrient supplements and insecticide-treated mosquito nets don't cost much, and would save millions of children."

In addition to southern Africa, infants were now more likely to die in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Iraq, Cambodia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Sierra Leone had the highest mortality rate, more than one in four children dying before the age of five, but that was slightly better than in the 1980s.

Several countries of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, had stagnated, but big improvements were made in Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Israel and Malaysia.