[ti:For Health of Young People, a Mixed Picture] [ar:Steve Ember] [al:Development Report] [by:WWW.51VOA.COM] [00:00.00]This is the VOA Special English [00:03.19]Development Report. [00:05.04]UNICEF says the death rate [00:07.98]for children under the age of five [00:10.72]has fallen twenty-eight percent [00:14.05]since nineteen ninety. [00:15.99]Experts credit the drop to improvements [00:19.28]in public health measures. [00:21.82]These include vaccination campaigns [00:24.81]and the use of bed nets chemically treated [00:28.64]to kill mosquitoes that spread malaria. [00:31.83]Still, Brian Hansford at the United Nations [00:35.77]Children's Fund says more work remains. [00:39.15]BRIAN HANSFORD: "Certainly the good news is [00:41.34]that the rate of deaths of children [00:43.91]under five years of age continued [00:45.60]to decline in two thousand eight. [00:47.35]The absolute number of child deaths declined [00:50.29]to an estimated eight-point-eight million [00:52.18]from twelve-point-five million in nineteen ninety. [00:55.12]Compared to nineteen ninety, [00:56.71]ten thousand fewer children are dying each day. [00:59.35]The bad news is that an annual death [01:02.28]total of eight-point-eight million [01:04.43]is still a tragedy, and so there's still much to do." [01:06.97]One of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals [01:10.21]is to reduce the under-five death rate [01:14.04]by two-thirds by two thousand fifteen. [01:17.38]One country that could reach this goal is Malawi. [01:21.82]In nineteen ninety, [01:24.01]there were two hundred twenty-five deaths [01:27.05]for every one thousand live births. [01:30.13]The estimate for last year was one hundred deaths. [01:34.37]UNICEF spokesman Brian Hansford says [01:38.10]pneumonia and diarrhea remain the world's [01:42.14]two greatest killers of young children. [01:45.27]Ninety-three percent of the deaths [01:48.06]happen in Africa and Asia. [01:51.21]A separate new study looked [01:54.81]at deaths worldwide in young people [01:57.59]age ten to twenty-four. [01:59.93]It found that ninety-seven percent [02:03.27]happen in low and middle income countries. [02:07.45]And two out of every five are [02:10.63]the result of injuries and violence. [02:14.21]Professor George Patton [02:16.71]at Royal Children's Hospital [02:18.75]in Melbourne, Australia, was the lead author. [02:22.14]GEORGE PATTON: "In high income countries [02:24.33]such as the United States, [02:26.48]the U.K. and Australia, death rates are around [02:30.86]forty-five per hundred thousand per year. [02:34.34]In sub-Saharan Africa we have [02:37.82]the highest death rates in the world, [02:40.21]and they are around seven times higher than that." [02:43.61]The study found that worldwide, [02:46.44]more than two and a half million people [02:49.54]age ten to twenty-four died in two thousand four. [02:54.32]Nearly two-thirds were [02:56.76]in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. [03:00.61]Conditions related to pregnancy [03:03.80]and childbirth were a leading cause [03:07.23]of deaths in females. [03:09.52]But for both sexes combined, [03:12.56]the leading killer in this age group [03:15.80]was traffic accidents. [03:18.19]Ten percent of all the deaths [03:20.63]were blamed on road injuries. [03:23.57]Next came suicide and violence. [03:27.40]Also in the top ten causes were infections, [03:32.78]including tuberculosis and H.I.V./AIDS, [03:38.11]as well as drowning and fire-related deaths. [03:43.03]The study appears in the journal The Lancet. [03:46.92]And that's the VOA Special English [03:50.74]Development Report, written by June Simms. [03:54.47]I'm Steve Ember.