UNICEF says child deaths down sharply since 1990

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global efforts to promote childhood immunization, breast-feeding and anti-malaria measures have helped cut by nearly a quarter the death rate of children under age 5 since 1990, UNICEF said on Wednesday.

Strong improvements in China and India helped drive a decline in worldwide child mortality, but children still died at very high rates in large regions of Africa south of the Sahara, United Nations Children's Fund figures showed.

UNICEF said 9.7 million children under the age of 5 died worldwide in 2006. Nearly half, 4.8 million, were in Sub-Saharan Africa, said Dr. Peter Salama, UNICEF chief of global health.

He said war and the AIDS virus hampered progress in Africa.

"There's overall progress in reducing child mortality, but clearly 9.7 million children dying every year is completely and totally unacceptable," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman, a former U.S. agriculture chief, said in a telephone interview.

Worldwide, the death rate for children under age 5 was 72 per 1,000 live births in 2006. Salama said that despite the recent progress, two-thirds of child deaths worldwide could be prevented using currently available health measures.

"We're below 10 million deaths for the first time," Salama said in a telephone interview. "It could be, really, that this is the tipping point -- that we now see a dramatic decline from here on in."

The 2006 rate is a 23 percent drop from 1990, when 93 per 1,000 children died before the age of 5. It is a 61 percent decrease from the rate of 184 per 1,000 in 1960, when 20 million young children died.