Rashaed Esson
Staff Writer
#WHO#ChildDeathrate,March 13th, 2024 – The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that the number of children who died before their 5th birthday has decreased, reaching a historic low of 4.9 million in 2022, declining by 51 percent since the year 2000. This is according to a recent release by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME). However, despite the major progress, there is still a lot of work to prevent child mortality, as data shows that in addition to the 4.9 million young lives lost, another 2.1 million children and youths, aged 5 to 25, also died, most of which were in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. The Organisation (WHO) says the main causes of these deaths are preventable and/or treatable issues such as complications around the time of birth, malaria and preterm birth, adding that lives could have been saved with better access to high-quality primary health care.
