GENEVA - About 9.7 million children die each year before their fifth birthday from diseases that could be prevented with simple, affordable measures, the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.
While the annual toll fell below 10 million for the first time, it still means more than 26,000 young children succumb every day to pneumonia, malaria and other scourges. Four million of them die in their first month of life.
"It is still completely and totally unacceptable that nearly 10 million children die every year of largely preventable causes," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said, noting that many infants also lose their mothers in childbirth.
"There is a great deal of work to be done, but it shows progress has been made and can continue to be made," she told Reuters in an interview.
UNICEF warned that despite recent advances, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East are falling short of a United Nations goal to reduce child mortality by two thirds between 1990 and 2015, to less than 5 million deaths per year.
"The enormity of the challenge should not be underestimated," the agency said in its annual report, "The State of the World's Children."
The toughest steps toward the U.N. target lie ahead - attempting to boost children's life expectancy in countries ravaged by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and plagued by weak governance and poor health systems, it said.
SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA FARES WORST
Sub-Saharan Africa has fared worst of the world's regions, and now accounts for 49 percent of under-five deaths worldwide but only 22 percent of births. A child born there has a one-in-six chance of dying before turning five.
