New plan to tame the world’s number two killer

Is diarrhoea — the second top killer of children — set to get as much attention and funding as HIV/Aids and malaria?

This possibility inched closer to reality when the World Health Organisation and Unicef released a seven-point treatment and prevention plan recently.

The plan hopes to reduce the number of children under five years who die from diarrhoea, the second leading killer after pneumonia.

Each year, the two agencies say, diarrhoea kills an estimated 1.5 million children out of the 9 million or so who die from a multitude of childhood diseases, many of them immunisable.

This figure means that the intestinal condition kills more children each year than HIV/Aids, malaria and measles combined.

Greater global focus on diarrhoeal diseases could be a boon to East Africa’s children. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are among 15 countries which account for almost three-quarters of diarrhoea deaths among children globally.

The others are Nigeria, Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Angola, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh and China.

Although specific data on the number of children who die from diarrhoea across East Africa is not readily available, it is thought that it far exceeds the fatalities caused by malaria.

This follows the offer of free insecticide-treated bed-nets and free treatment in government hospitals.

Recently, The Lancet, reported that the main reason diarrhoea kills so many children worldwide is that treatment and prevention programmes in poor countries are not well-funded.

“Funding and attention directed toward the control of diarrhoea in recent years has been insufficient to address its enormous global burden,” the article says.

“Any effort to achieve Millennium Development Goal 4 — to reduce child mortality — will have to address this major cause of child deaths.”

In the seven-point programme unveiled by WHO and Unicef, titled Diarrhoea: why children are still dying and what can be done, the two agencies say that most of the childhood deaths can be prevented through simple interventions such as promotion of early and exclusive breastfeeding and vitamin A supplementation.

Other preventive measures are improvement of domestic water quantity and quality, including treatment and safe storage of household water.

Yet others are higher standards of community-wide sanitation; and public awareness on the benefits of washing hands with soap.