Pacific islands failing to achieve UN goals on reducing child deaths
Updated
An increase in the number of child deaths and under-nourished children are listed among the reasons Pacific Island nations are failing to meet UN Millennium Challenge goals. The World Bank challenged delegates at a discussion entitled "Improving Pacific Outsomes", to solve the issue of underweight and under nourished children which are the underlying causes of more than one third of child deaths.
Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Reverend Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia
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COSTELLO: That's a failure of our political will and really our moral imagination. The truth is whilst we have been making progress; 25 years ago it was 60,000 kids that died, we've halved that number to 30,000 two years ago and last year it dropped again to 26,000 children dying a day. But when you consider how wealthy we are compared to our parents and grandparents, that is still really a blasphemy, it is obscene. And with the global financial crisis it's only intensified, with the World Bank saying 150,000 kids are dying directly because of the global financial crisis, who would not have died but for it. So those who are at the back of the queue who are often invisible to us are paying the real price of the global financial crisis, not those of us who look at our share portfolio or our superannuation levels back to 2001 levels. The real cost is children's lives.
COUTTS: Well the World Bank discussion looked at initiative approaches to address some of the diverse health challenges facing the Pacific region. What are they talking about there?
COSTELLO: Well we're really seeing in our region, why is it that countries like Papua New Guinea and East Timor and others are so off track with the Millenium Development Goals. The only good thing about the Millenium Development Goals is at least we know we're off track from the targets we set. Now Papua New Guinea obviously has particular challenges with remoteness, but the lack of skilled birth attendants for mothers means that the mortality rates really aren't dropping as they should, as the Millenium Development Goals anticipated. Part of it our spend, there's about $19 billion being spent on global health and the UN estimates it needs to be about $34 billion. Part of it is some bad governance and Papua New Guinea's own health inquiry says that their decentralisation process hasn't worked and people aren't getting the access they once got. But there's a range of reasons, but essentially we know that women, the half a million who die in child birth won't die if there are skilled birth attendants. The post partum hemorrhaging, obstetric obstructions won't occur if there are people who are skilled and trained that they can get access to. So really the ball is back in our court as to how serious we are.
COUTTS: And what's the answer to that question?
COSTELLO: Well part of it a greater spend. We know that there's at least, according to WHO, 330,000 midwives lacking in poor countries, we know we simply haven't spent there. Some of the solution is also ensuring that local communities recognise signs when a woman in childbirth is having discharges or fever, to actually say this is dangerous, get her to a hospital or to a health clinic. So we know there are simple interventions from rehydration, certainly children can die from diarrhoea, to iron folate vitamin supplements for women who suffer anemia, because these deaths are knocking us off track from the Millenium Development Goals and the toll in human suffering is just terrible.
COUTTS: Well there up to 50,000 maternal and 300,000 newborn deaths in the western Pacific region alone, and that infant mortality rates are at 130 per 1000 in Timor, less than 75 per 1000 in Papua New Guinea. Now we've been hearing these arguments and these figures for a long time, and yet the figures are still going up. So what do we need to do now, and there also have been accusations that the aid money isn't being spent in the correct areas?
COSTELLO: Yeah look these are complex solutions. Part of it is strengthening the public health systems in which people need to know that government are not simply mission or NGO health clinics are their only choice. I should say in Papua New Guinea NGO and church based health systems are often trusted much by people much more than the public health system. So there has to be some policy government measures taken, but very simply we know that getting them vitamin A, getting iron folate supplements to women is incredibly important. If they're underweight and their child's birth is underweight then there's a reason that in the neo-natal period of four weeks that 40 per cent of those 10 million children who die each year die because of malnourishment, because of being underweight. And there are simple interventions that we can take and we need to take.
