Resolved to Help the Children

YESTERDAY 40,000 children under the age of five died in developing countries. Another 40,000 will die today. Another 40,000 tomorrow. Most of these deaths could be prevented.

For years this situation has been called the “silent emergency” or the “quiet catastrophe,” meaning that it has largely escaped world attention. “If 40,000 spotted owls were dying every day, there would be outrage. But 40,000 children are dying, and it’s hardly noticed,” lamented Peter Teeley, a U.S. spokesman at the UN World Summit for Children held at UN headquarters in New York in 1990.

The summit, some feel, may eventually change all of that. Top officials, including 71 heads of State, attended from 159 countries. Together they represented 99 percent of the world’s population. The mood was summed up by Mikhail Gorbachev, who said: “Mankind can no longer put up with the fact that millions of children die every year.”

Children in Crisis

A boy, age 12, toils 11 hours a day breaking rocks in a quarry in India. He earns 85 cents (U.S.) a day.

A girl, ten, sells her body in a Bangkok brothel. She is not there because she wants to be. Her father sold her for $400.

A young soldier, ten, helps to man a roadblock in an African country. A machine gun hangs from his shoulder; he passes time smoking marijuana.

SUCH situations are all too common in the developing nations. Children in crisis number into the millions. Seven million languish in refugee camps; 30 million wander the streets homeless; 80 million between the ages of 10 and 14 labor at jobs that cripple their normal development; well over 100 million face death in this decade for want of food, clean water, and health care.

Consider just a few of the problems facing children around the globe.

Disease

About 8,000 children die each day because they have not been vaccinated against such diseases as measles and whooping cough. An additional 7,000 die daily because their parents do not know how to deal with the dehydration that results from diarrhea. Every day another 7,000 children die because they are not given a dollar’s worth of antibiotics to fight against respiratory infections.

For years medicines and therapies have been available to prevent or cure many of the illnesses that have long scourged the human family. But they have not reached millions who need them. As a result, during the past two decades, about a hundred million children perished from diarrheic and respiratory diseases alone. “It is as if a cure had finally been found for cancer but then little used for 20 years,” bemoaned UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 1990.

Despite the grim situation, progress has been made. For example, UNICEF and WHO (World Health Organization) have pursued a vigorous campaign of immunization. In 1991 it was announced that 80 percent of the world’s children had been immunized against the six vaccine-​preventable diseases​—measles, tetanus, diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, and whooping cough. Together with parallel efforts in the control of diarrheic diseases, this has resulted in the saving of several million young lives each year.

But in recent years another disease​—AIDS—​has emerged to threaten and possibly even reverse all the progress made in African child survival over the past decade. During the decade of the 90’s, as many as 2.7 million youngsters may die from AIDS in Africa alone. By the year 2000, an additional three million to five million children in Central and East Africa may be orphaned because their parents died of AIDS.

Malnutrition

All of us are painfully familiar with the tragic pictures of starving children with skeletonlike bodies, bloated bellies, and dull eyes staring at nothing. Those pathetic youngsters represent just the tip of the iceberg of malnutrition. Throughout the developing world, about 177 million children​—1 in 3—​go to bed hungry. And their number is increasing.

Persistent malnutrition prevents children from reaching their full mental and physical potential. Most malnourished children are frail, listless, lackluster-​eyed, and apathetic. They play less and learn slower than well-​fed children. They are also more susceptible to infection, a major factor that contributes to about a third of the 14 million child deaths in developing countries every year.

Just as modern science has produced medicines to fight disease, so it has also made it possible to produce and deliver more than enough food to feed everyone on earth. But there are no quick fixes for malnutrition. It cannot be eliminated by food shipments and vitamin pills. Its roots lie in relentless poverty, widespread ignorance, unclean water, unsanitary conditions, and lack of farmland in poverty-​stricken areas.

Environmental Problems

As the global environmental crisis deepens, it is children who are most vulnerable. Consider air pollution. Under age three a child at rest inhales proportionally twice as much air, and with it twice as much pollution, as does a resting adult. And since children do not yet have fully developed kidneys, livers, and enzyme systems, they are not able to process pollutants as efficiently as adults can.

Children thus suffer more harm than adults do from lead additives in gasoline and from gases such as carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, and sulfur dioxide. This vulnerability contributes directly to the death of the more than 4.2 million children under five years of age who die of respiratory infections each year in developing countries. Many of the survivors grow up with respiratory diseases that plague them for the rest of their lives.

Since they are still growing physically, children are also more vulnerable to the effects of improper diet than are adults. In country after country, children are the big losers as forests shrink, deserts grow, and overworked farmland erodes, becomes tired, and produces less and less food. In Africa alone about 39 million children have had their growth stunted because of poor nutrition.

Adding to the problem is the severe shortage of good water. Throughout the developing world, only half of the children have access to clean drinking water, and even fewer have access to sanitary waste-​disposal facilities.

War

In times past, most war victims were soldiers. No longer. Since the second world war, 80 percent of the 20 million killed and 60 million wounded in various conflicts have been civilians​—mostly women and children. At one stage during the 1980’s, 25 children in Africa were dying every hour as a result of such conflicts! Countless numbers of children have been killed, wounded, abandoned, orphaned, or taken hostage.

The millions of children who are now growing up in refugee camps are often deprived of identity and nationality as well as of adequate food, health care, and education. Many find it impossible to acquire skills that will earn them a place in society.

But children are not merely victims of wars; they are also fighters of wars. In recent years 200,000 youngsters under 15 years of age have been recruited, armed, and trained to kill. Among them were those who lost life or limbs as they obeyed orders to open pathways through fields of land mines.