Editorial
Diminishing infant mortality rate
A laurel hardly to rest our oars on
THE flagship Unicef report titled "The State of the World's Children" has some good words for Bangladesh. The rate of child mortality has halved in country over the 18 years since 1990, a point in time that Bangladesh ratified the Convention of the Rights of the Child(CRC). Statistically, the findings make an impressive reading: the mortality rate dropping off to 43 from 103 per 1000 births and the rate below age 5 decreasing from 149 to 54 per thousand. But there further messages to it.
Our child immunisation programme has been a model in South Asia contributing to a large extent to the drop in mortality rate. Yet, we believe, it could be still better if child deliveries including pre-and-post-natal care were not left to untrained traditional rural mid-wives. If the pregnancies were handled in the rural health centres as a rule than many more children would have survived. So, this is a vastly untrodden area which the government needs to traverse in order to ensure that would-be mothers resort to hospital care.
The next task is to guarantee reasonable levels of maternal and child nutrition which is in a deplorable state now: 43 per cent children below five numbering around 7.2 million are chronically under nourished. The curse of mal-nourishment and under-nourishment lingers into later years leading to morbidity or undeveloped mental faculties. Let's not forget, the state of mental and physical health of children is the stuff of which the quality of our future generations is made. Unless, the vast majority of our children grow into productive citizens of the country, the nation as a whole cannot prosper.
Basically, the approach should be a holistic one rather than fragmentary with all the necessary elements mutually reinforcing one another into a massive child care undertaking. Besides food, they must have access to sanitation, shelter and functional literacy.
If the children have been victims of unplanned urbanisation, they seem to be the most vulnerable to climate change effects. This is an additional dimension. Unless we have sufficiently rid the children of the existing problems, we risk being overtaken by the challenges of climate change. This needs to be recognised for the required policy reorientation.
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