Child deaths fall slightly to 9.2 mln in 2007-UN

By Michael Kahn

LONDON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - More than 9 million children globally died before their fifth birthday in 2007, down slightly from 2006, but a huge gap remains between rich and poor countries, especially in Africa, UNICEF said on Friday.

Efforts to promote breastfeeding, immunisations and anti-malaria measures have helped cut child deaths to 9.2 million from 9.7 million a year ago and 12.7 million in 1990, the figures from the United Nations Children's Fund showed.

"Since 1960, the global under-five mortality rate has declined more than 60 percent, and the new data shows the downward trend continues," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said in a statement.

Improvements in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and in parts of Asia drove the overall decline, but deaths remain high in sub-Saharan Africa where one in seven children dies before age 5.

AIDS is still a major killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, though countries such as Eritrea, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Ethiopia have made significant progress in cutting mortality rates, UNICEF said.

"Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for almost half of the 9.2 million deaths among children in this age group annually," according to the UNICEF report published in the journal Lancet.

"High levels of fertility...together with high levels of mortality in children aged less than 5 years have led to an increase in the absolute number of deaths (in this region)."

Worldwide, the death rate for children under age 5 was 68 per 1,000 live births in 2007, down from the 93 per 1,000 in 1990 and 72 per 1,000 a year ago.

Sierra Leone had the worst under-five mortality rate in the world with 262 out of every 1,000 children dying before their fifth birthday. The rate in industrialised nations was 6 per 1,000.

A number of countries, including Laos, Bangladesh, Bolivia and Nepal, have also made good progress toward meeting global targets to reduce the child mortality rates by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, UNICEF said.

"Recent data also indicate encouraging improvements in many of the basic health interventions, such as early and exclusive breast feeding, measles immunisation, Vitamin A supplementation, the use of insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria, and prevention and treatment of AIDS," Veneman said.

"These interventions are expected to result in further declines in child mortality over the coming years." (Reporting by Michael Kahn, Editing by Maggie Fox and Robert Hart)