The world has actually become dramatically healthier in the last 20 years, says Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and wife of Bill Gates, American billionaire founder of Microsoft as she announced that under-five mortality rates have declined by more than 50 percent since 1990 in a conference call with journalists on January 16.
“Deaths due to infectious diseases like HIV, malaria, measles have halved from their 1990 levels, and they’ve contributed to nearly 100 percent in the overall decline in mortality in poor countries,” said Gates.
This development is attributed largely to support from organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who have donated $10billion devoted to health funds fighting to improve healthcare in many countries as well as governments helping to speed up research on new vaccines and improve healthcare delivery in poor countries including Nigeria.
“Global health funds are behind a lot of this progress” agrees Bill Gates who is calling on countries to ramp up support to these depleting funds during the Davos meeting later in the year.
The funds include GAVI, which has been focused on childhood vaccines, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which is working to eradicate polio, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS TB and Malaria, and more recently, the Global Financing Facility, which is focused on maternal and child health.
“As we’ve gone through over the last 20 years, these institutions have had to learn as they go along. They faced lots of problems trying to get the prices down, try to get the supply to be reliable, trying to get out, deliver to some of the toughest places in the world, including extremely rural areas with no infrastructure, including places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where you’ve got areas where you’ve got war taking place.
“Each of these organizations has been through changes in terms of how they build partnerships, how they make sure none of the money goes astray by some corruption somewhere in that delivery chain. And it’s been really fantastic,” said Bill Gates.
Melinda adds, “Around the year 2000, the world started investing more in global health, and in particular in global health institutions that really pooled the world’s resources to buy things that we knew would make the people healthier.”
“The data has been really striking to us about these investments. A child born today is “half as likely to die before the age of five” compared to if she was born in 2000,” said Melinda
Research by Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation agrees with this assertion as it finds that there has been a dramatic reduction in under-five deaths since 1990.
The World Health Organization in a 2017 study found that although the number of children dying before the age of five is at a new low – 5.6 million in 2016 compared to nearly 9.9 million in 2000 – the proportion of under-five deaths in the new-born period has increased from 41 per cent to 46 per cent during the same period.
This is mostly from countries like Nigeria, India and others. According to United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), nearly ten per cent of new-born deaths in the world in 2016 occurred in Nigeria.
According to the report, five countries accounted for half of all new-born deaths last year, with Nigeria third in the list. These are India (24 per cent), Pakistan (10 per cent), Nigeria (9 per cent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4 per cent) and Ethiopia (3 per cent). Most new-born deaths occurred in two regions: Southern Asia (39 per cent) and sub-Saharan Africa (38 per cent).
The report showed that 15,000 children died globally before their fifth birthday in 2016, with 46 per cent of the deaths (7.000) occurring in the first 28 days of life.
However, the UNICEF Chief of Health, Stefan Peterson, said though the lives of 50 million children under-five have been saved since 2000 through increased level of commitment by governments and development partners to tackle preventable child deaths, more still needs to be done to stop babies from dying the day they are born, or days after their birth.
This is why Bill Gates is urging for more action to stay the course. “People shouldn’t be complacent now.”
