Primary Health for All (Extended version): Scientific American

Primary Health for All (Extended version): Scientific American: "Primary Health for All (Extended version)
Ten key actions could globally ensure a basic human right at almost unnoticeable cost
By Jeffrey D. Sachs

recent UNICEF report on child mortality provides some harrowing data combined with some startling hope. The shock is that 9.7 million children under the age of five years died in 2006. The good news in this bleak statistic is that it is actually down from 12.7 million in 1990, out of populations of roughly 630 million children under age five in both years. The even better news is that the remaining nearly 10 million deaths are themselves almost totally avoidable, at low cost, and in a way which will ease rather than exacerbate the population pressures of poor countries.
Almost all of the deaths (roughly 98 percent) occur in the developing countries. These are deaths, in effect, of extreme poverty and the under-provisioning of health systems in poor countries. The causes of death reflect the unsafe living conditions of the poor (such as vulnerability to tropical diseases, unsafe drinking water, and indoor air pollution) and the lack of access to preventative and curative health services. The main contributors to the high death rates are deaths that occur in the first 28 days after birth, caused by diarrhea (from unsafe drinking water), respiratory infection (often caused by wood-burning stoves), malaria, and vaccine-preventable diseases. It is estimated that around half of all deaths have chronic under-nourishment as a co-factor."/.../