A dramatic new TV ad (showing as school devoid of students) claims that 25 million children have died of AIDS. Let us assume that is true. The WHO, however, states that 'AIDS' accounts for only 3% of child disease related mortaities. (As reported in the Orange County Register - An ultra conservative daily).

So if 25 million have died of 'AIDS' then the total deaths exceed 832.5 million. Clearly this has not happened in the USA, Canada, Australia or Europe and so we must assume nearly all have died in the Third World.

If that is true then EVERY SINGLE CHILD IN AFRICA and INDIA IS ALREADY DEAD.

No more problem!

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Millions of children die needlessly
Nearly 11 million under age 5 succumb each year, largely to easily preventable illnesses, health experts say.


By EMMA ROSS
The Associated Press

LONDON – The lives of 6 million children under 5 could be saved every year if flu shots and other low-cost measures to prevent or treat disease were more widely used, global health experts say.

Every year, nearly 11 million children worldwide die before their fifth birthdays, most from preventable causes such as diarrhea, pneumonia, neonatal problems and malaria. Malnutrition is a major factor in more than half those deaths, researchers estimate.

In a series of articles this week in The Lancet medical journal, experts say inexpensive lifesaving measures - such as breast feeding, insecticide-treated bed nets, flu shots, antibiotics, newborn resuscitation and clean childbirth - are not reaching the mothers and children who need them most.

Scaling up those interventions to a level that would save 6 million lives a year would cost about $7.5 billion annually, the experts say.

In the 1980s, the world made great progress in reducing unnecessary child deaths through a UNICEF campaign called the child-survival revolution. But the momentum was lost in the 1990s.

"We have dropped the ball," said one of the experts, Cesar Victora, professor of epidemiology at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil. "Child survival has fallen off the international agenda. We need now a second revolution to finish this job."

The number of deaths among children under 5 fell from 117 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 93 per 1,000 in 1990. Today, the death rate is still declining but not as quickly - in 2000, it was 83 per 1,000.

Experts stressed two main reasons why progress appears to have stalled.

One is the realization in the 1990s that HIV/AIDS was decimating populations in Africa, which shifted the world's attention and resources toward fighting specific diseases, such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

"I'm not saying that it was wrong, but child health lost out in that," said Hans Troedsson, director of child and adolescent health and development at the World Health Organization.

The experts noted that the total number of child deaths each year is greater than deaths due to HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

The other major factor was complacency, experts say.

"We were doing really well," Troedsson said. "There was a kind of attitude that the job was more or less finished. That kind of perception meant that a lot of investments and commitments to keep the steam in child survival was actually lost."

Other experts said the death of former UNICEF leader Jim Grant, who spearheaded the child-survival revolution of the 1980s, left a void in global leadership as UNICEF's focus shifted toward children's rights and education.

The U.N. children's agency said it still spends most of its money on child-survival programs and that many of its newer strategies addressing children's rights and education translate in the long term to better child survival.

"The easy gains have been made," said UNICEF spokeswoman Marjorie Newman-Williams. "We have now plateaued because the strategies we have to put in place are more difficult."

Whereas earlier strategies were focused on delivering vaccines and medicines to clinics, future progress does not necessarily depend on that, she said. The benefits of that approach have been mostly mined, she said.

Many of the actions that will reduce the deaths now are those that have to be taken into the home, such as breast-feeding, bed nets and proper infant nutrition after weaning.

"Those three heavily depend on women's time, women's knowledge and availability," Newman-Williams said. "And to reduce neonatal mortality, you have to focus on women's health. This is not a child health intervention."