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March 03, 2005
Culture of Life
Yet another reminder of how little non-rich, mostly non-white life is valued in this world:
Three million newborns who die each year could be saved with low-tech and low-cost measures but are condemned because funding and research is devoted to high-tech solutions used almost exclusively by the rich, an international study said Thursday.Every year, four million babies die in the first month of life, according to research announced Thursday and being published by the international medical journal The Lancet. That amounts to more than 10,000 neonatal deaths per day.
''Virtually all (99 percent) occur in low- and middle-income countries, yet most research, publications, and funding focus on high-tech care for the one percent of deaths that occur in rich countries,'' the study said.
...
Measures to prevent three million of the four million annual newborn deaths are startlingly simple and cheap.
They range from tetanus immunization--involving two 20-cent injections--during pregnancy to exclusive breastfeeding, clean delivery, and antibiotics to treat illness.
''At less than one dollar per capita [person] per year in additional spending to provide these life saving interventions to 90 percent of mothers and babies, the cost is affordable,'' said Gary Darmstadt, a Johns Hopkins University academic and research adviser to the aid group Save the Children USA, which helped produce the study.
Mind you, we aren't just cheap and uncaring. It's worse, much worse:
If funding and services for newborns are failing to reach the world's poorest, the same is to be said of global aid in general, according to a report last week from international charities Oxfam and ActionAid.The groups accused the wealthiest nations of failing the poor with a ''self-serving and hypocritical'' system of aid, saying 40 percent of it is ''tied,'' forcing developing countries to buy overpriced goods and services from donor countries.
It accused the United States and Italy of being the worst culprits in so-called aid ''round tripping,'' spending some 70 percent of their aid on their own companies.
Posted by zeynep at March 3, 2005 11:16 PM
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Comments
Mmm. $600,000 spending could save 3 million children's death? So what exactly does UNICEF spend its $685 *million* dollar biennial budget on anyways?
Presumably they have even more effective programs that need funding first? That would mean they're presumably saving more than, oh, about 1.5 *billion* children per year already?
Posted by: at March 4, 2005 01:32 AM
And where are the "pro life" people in all of this?
Posted by: trouble at March 4, 2005 03:45 AM
I think the less than a dollar per capita referred to people in the world, not the 3 million children. The figure I saw was 4 billion dollars per year could save 3/4 of the 4 million children who die, so that's about 1000 dollars per child.
Anyway, the US is spending hundreds of billions of dollars and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and losing tens of thousands (killed and seriously wounded) soldiers in Iraq, so you'd think if we were sincere about helping people we could scrape up a few billion to do this. And that it would have been done without any pressure, because, you know, we're so compassionate.
It's been obvious for years that a little bit of money could save millions of lives--maybe the voices of people pointing this out are becoming loud enough so that something will actually happen.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at March 4, 2005 10:05 AM
"Bombs may kill the hungry, the sick and the ignorant, but bombs cannot kill hunger, disease and ignorance." - Fidel Castro
Posted by: Eli Stephens at March 4, 2005 12:16 PM
Hmm. Tried to post a link on that previous quote, it didn't take. Can't you post links in this comment system?
Posted by: Eli Stephens at March 4, 2005 12:17 PM
Hi Eli,
Not HTML --it gets automatically stripped-- but all urls should be transformed to links. Here's your link:
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_lefti_archive.html#109612272059927206
This limitation is due to the ever-increasing, and ever-annoying, comment spam. The site is about to be updated to a newer version of movable post which may help.
Posted by: Zeynep at March 4, 2005 01:02 PM
The "pro life" people only care while that life is in the womb, once its born - alive or stillborn, and maybe even taking the mother with it - they no longer care.
Posted by: LamontCranston at March 13, 2005 01:58 AM