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STORY: GENEVA / NEUMONIA & DIARRHEA DEATHS
TRT: 2.53
SOURCE: WHO / UNICEF
RESTRICTIONS: embargoed until 18:30 New York local time 11/04/ 2013- 01:01 Geneva local time 12/04/2013
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 11 APRIL 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND / FILE
FILE – RECENT - WHO
1. Wide shot, exterior WHO headquarters
11 APRIL 2013, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
2. Close up, report
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Elizabeth Mason, Director of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health, WHO:
“This report is a new approach, an integrated approach to protecting children, preventing illness and treating illness when it occurs when it for pneumonia and diarrhoea, bringing together the different sectors and bringing together the different programmes towards protecting with vaccines, preventing through good breastfeeding, through water and sanitation, reduction of indoor air pollution and treating the children with simple, effective antibiotics, with oral rehydration salts and zinc. With this integrated approach we can save two million children’s lives each year from pneumonia and diarrhoea, and move towards the targets of ending preventable deaths in children under five.”
4. Cutaway, report
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Elizabeth Mason, Director of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health, WHO:
“It is also important that the health worker works together with the environmental health worker for example, so that if they are looking at prevention of indoor air pollution and clean cook stoves, the health worker recognizes and also the environmental health worker recognizes that this will save children’s lives by preventing pneumonia. The same for water and sanitation, that they will recognize that this will prevent children getting diarrhoea, and therefore prevent deaths from diarrhea and adding on the new vaccines, we have a triangular approach: protect, prevent and treat that collectively can actually eliminate deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea, in children.”
6. Cutaway, report
FILE –UNICEF –RECENT 2012
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Mickey Chopra, global head of UNICEF’s health programmes:
“The highest rates of death from pneumonia as well as the highest incidents of pneumonia are in the poorest countries and in the poorest parts of countries around the world. So within a lifetime we can have world in which the chances of a child surviving are the same in Niger or in Ethiopia as they are in New York.”
FILE – UNICEF – PLACE AND DATE UNKNOWN
8. Various shots, nurse preparing oral vaccination and vaccinating child
FILE – WHO –NOVEMBER 2012, SUDAN
9. Various shots, child vaccination
FILE – WHO – NOVEMBER 2008, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
10. Various shots, Cholera ward with children in beds
FILE – WHO – 2010, AFGHANISTAN
11. Various shot, child with pneumonia on a bed with mother
A new Global Action Plan launched today (11 April) by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF has the potential to save up to 2 million children every year from deaths caused by pneumonia and diarrhoea, some of the leading killers of children under five globally.
The Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea calls for closer integration of efforts to prevent and treat these two diseases and sets ambitious targets to reduce mortality rates and raise levels of children’s access to life-saving interventions.
Elizabeth Mason, Director of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health at WHO said that the approach is a new one, “an integrated approach to protecting children, preventing illness and treating illness when it occurs when it for pneumonia and diarrhoea, bringing together the different sectors and bringing together the different programmes towards protecting with vaccines, preventing through good breastfeeding, through water and sanitation, reduction of indoor air pollution and treating the children with simple, effective antibiotics, with oral rehydration salts and zinc.”
Many factors contribute to these two conditions, so no single intervention can effectively prevent, treat or control either pneumonia or diarrhoea. However, as richer countries have demonstrated, a number of elements are key to reducing infections and deaths from both diseases. For example, good nutrition and a clean environment help protect children from both pneumonia and diarrhoea. New vaccines are being introduced to protect children from these diseases. Good access to health services and the right medicines can ensure they get the treatment they need. But many existing efforts to address pneumonia and diarrhoea in low- and middle-income countries have yet to capitalize on these common elements.
Mason said that it is also important that health worker works together with the environmental health worker, “so that if they are looking at prevention of indoor air pollution and clean cook stoves, the health worker recognizes and also the environmental health worker recognizes that this will save children’s lives by preventing pneumonia.”
And according to Dr Mickey Chopra, the global head of UNICEF’s health programmes,
“The highest rates of death from pneumonia as well as the highest incidents of pneumonia are in the poorest countries and in the poorest parts of countries around the world. So within a lifetime we can have world in which the chances of a child surviving are the same in Niger or in Ethiopia as they are in New York.”
The new WHO/UNICEF Action Plan sets clear goals for the world to achieve by 2025: a 75 per cent reduction in incidence of severe pneumonia and diarrhoea from 2010 levels among children under five, and the virtual elimination of deaths from both diseases in the same age-group. It also aims for a 40 per cent reduction in the global number of children under five who are stunted.
The Action Plan’s targets are significantly higher than current levels. For example, it calls for 90 per cent of all children to have access to antibiotics for pneumonia and oral rehydration salts for diarrhoea, up from current levels of 31 and 35 per cent respectively. As an interim target, at least half of all children under six months should be exclusively breastfed, against 2012 levels of 39 per cent. All children should have access to improved sanitation and safe drinking water, from 63 and 89 per cent respectively; and building on the good progress already made in some countries in introducing new vaccines against pneumococcal bacteria and rotavirus, it aims for 90 per cent coverage by the target date.
The Action Plan calls on governments and other stakeholders to prioritize investment in the population groups with the poorest access to services to prevent and treat pneumonia and diarrhoea. Nearly 90 per cent of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths in children currently occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The Action Plan comes at a time when the global community has strengthened its commitment towards the health MDGs, including towards reducing child mortality. These include the United Nations Secretary-General’s Every Woman Every Child initiative and within it, “Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed”, a global movement spearheaded by UNICEF through which more than 170 countries have committed to ending all preventable child deaths by 2035.
In scaling up and refining existing efforts to protect children from diarrhoea and pneumonia and treat them appropriately when affected, improved coordination between existing programmes and a wide range of actors, including the community and the private sector, will be key. Efforts must also be sustainable over the longer term.
