Treatable Maladies to Kill 100 Million Children

More than 100 million children will die from illness and malnutrition in the 1990s although cures are available, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund.

In its annual State of the World’s Children report released Tuesday, UNICEF says 8,000 children die every day because they have not been immunized, nearly 7,000 die daily from dehydration and about 6,000 from pneumonia.

Making available low-cost solutions to children’s health problems would cost about $2.5 billion a year, which is equal to what the Soviet Union spends a year on vodka and U.S. companies spend on cigarette advertising, according to UNICEF.

Military spending and debt servicing cost Third World nations almost $1 billion a day in resources that could be used to provide health care for millions of these children, the report said.

The report said that Third World nations could save 7.6 million children from death by disease every year by shifting a small part of their military expenditures to health care.

Developing countries now owe $1.3 trillion to industrial nations and their commercial banks.

“What this means is that the heaviest burden of the debt crisis is falling on the growing minds and bodies of children in the developing countries,” the report said.

At a news conference Tuesday in Washington, James P. Grant, executive director of UNICEF, said: “It is in the power of industrial countries to significantly reduce the debt burden, which is taking such a tremendous toll.”

If trends continue, the report said, more than 100 million children will die needlessly in the next decade.

“They will die in the sunken-eyed coma of dehydration, or in the gasping extremities of pneumonia, or in the iron grip of tetanus, or in the fever of measles, or on the rack of whooping cough,” Grant said.

Those illnesses, all treatable or preventable with inexpensive vaccines, antibiotics or oral rehydration therapy, account for more than half of the 14 million annual child deaths and most of the malnutrition, according to UNICEF.

To mobilize the political will to solve those problems in the 1990s, UNICEF is planning a “World Summit for Children” in September in New York.

About 1.5 billion children will be born in the 1990s, the largest generation in history. U.N. figures indicate the birthrate will begin to decline in the next century.