<p>UNICEF Innocenti's Report Card 17 explores how 43 OECD/EU countries are faring in providing healthy environments for children. Beyond children’s immediate environments, over-consumption in
Some 330 babies of less than one month of age die in the country everyday while eight million or 48 per cent of the children below five years are underweight. This is the state of child survival in Bangladesh as revealed in a global report launched by UNICEF, which still says Bangladesh is on track to attain the target-4 of the UN Millennium Development Goals for reducing under-five mortality rate to 50 per thousand by 2015 from current rate of 65.
Below, eight leaders in the fight against hunger offer up food crisis action plans, and long term ideas for how to end famine and bolster farming. Every day, 25,000 people die from hunger-related causes. And when food accounts for more than half a poor family's spending, price rises can be truly devastating for millions living on the edge.
For an outpost town with little hope, it's nothing short of a miracle. Just some 20 km away from the Nepal border, Narkatiaganj village is one of Bihar's dens of extortion and kidnapping. But a bit more reassuring picture emerges when you visit its primary health centre (PHC), buzzing with activity as seven doctors attend to nearly 300 patients a day.
VACCINES and domestic immunisation policy form a critical component of a nation
A total of 509 toilets have been constructed in schools against the district administration's target of 532. Moreover, toilets have been constructed in all the anganvadis in the district
Aiming to achieve historic success by total eradication of polio from Pakistan, the government is intensifying schedule of supplementary immunisation activities to include four rounds of National Immunisation Days (NIDs) and four sub-national activities in 2008. The next campaign will commence from March 4. This was stated by the Extended Programme of Immunisation (EPI) manager, H.B. Memon, as he briefed the media persons here at an event organised by the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef). The strategy works in Pakistan, still one of the four countries globally that are still polio endemic, Mr Memon said. He said: "Before initiation of the programme the number of cases of polio was estimated to be about 25,000 to 30,000 a year. Some 230,000 children were saved from paralysis after NIDs were introduced in 1994. The number of cases dropped to 1,147 in 1997, 40 cases in 2006, 32 in 2007 and only two in 2008 (Nawabshah and Hyderabad).' Informing about the upcoming sub-national campaign, a total of 16.79 million children under five years of age would be targeted in 54 districts of the country. A total of 43,033 vaccination teams, 7,922 area supervisors and 1,296 zonal supervisors would participate in the campaign. The campaign activities will also be monitored by more than 500 national monitors. Stressing on increasing geographical restriction of wild polio virus, the EPI representative said the majority of districts had been polio free for almost two years. Sixty per cent of the cases in 2006 were from six districts only. There had been no cases from the Federally Administered Northern Areas (Fana) since 1998, Azad Jammu and Kashmir since 2000 or Islamabad since 2003. The vast majority of population, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, lived in polio free areas, as wild polio virus transmission is currently focal in two main areas
In a small room, in a modest, but well-maintained building in Central Cairo, a phone rings. The caller, a woman, suspects that her husband has been having sex with someone else. She is concerned that
New malaria vaccines
Hunger is unpalatable. For a government that wishes to assert that it is not callous, it is particularly so. But hunger, with a capital H, is a pill that millions of people in Madhya Pradesh continue to swallow.
TWO years after the Asian tsunami, as the images of devastation fade off from global public memory, the disaster persists for villages along the coastline of Sri Lanka's Southern Province. Survivors
