An estimated 6.3 million children died before their 15th birthdays in 2017, or one every five seconds, mostly due to a lack of water, sanitation, nutrition and basic health care, according to report by United Nations agencies on Tuesday.
The vast majority of these deaths — 5.4 million — occur in the first five years of life, with newborns accounting for around half of the deaths, the report said.
“With simple solutions like medicines, clean water, electricity and vaccines” this toll could be dramatically reduced, said Laurence Chandy, an expert with the UN children’s fund UNICEF. But without “urgent action,” 56 million children under five — half of them newborns — will die between now and 2030.
Globally, in 2017, half of all deaths in children under five were in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in 13 children died before their fifth birthday. In high-income countries, that number was one in 185, according to the report co-led by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
It found that most children under five die due to preventable or treatable causes such as complications during birth, pneumonia, diarrhoea, neonatal sepsis and malaria. Among older children, aged five to 14, injuries become a more prominent cause of death, especially from drowning and road traffic.
