Title:
For Health of Young People, a Mixed Picture
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
UNICEF says the death rate for children under the
age of five has fallen twenty-eight percent since
nineteen ninety. Experts credit the drop to
improvements in public health measures. These
include vaccination campaigns and the use of bed
nets chemically treated to kill mosquitoes that
spread malaria.
Still, Brian Hansford at the United Nations
Children's Fund says more work remains. He says the
good news is that the rate of deaths of children
under five years of age continued to decrease in two
thousand eight. The number of child deaths decreased
to an estimated eight-point-eight million from
twelve-point-five million in nineteen ninety.
Compared to nineteen ninety, ten thousand fewer
children are dying each day. The bad news is that
a yearly death total of eight-point-eight million is
still a tragedy, and so there is still much to do.
One of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals is to
reduce the under-five death rate by two-thirds by
two thousand fifteen. One country that could reach
this goal is Malawi. In nineteen ninety, there were
two hundred twenty-five deaths for every one
thousand live births. The estimate for last year was
one hundred deaths.
UNICEF spokesman Brian Hansford says pneumonia and
diarrhea remain the world's two greatest killers of
young children. Ninety-three percent of the deaths
happen in Africa and Asia.
A separate new study looked at deaths worldwide in
young people age ten to twenty-four. It found that
ninety-seven percent happen in low and middle income
countries. And two out of every five are the result
of injuries and violence.
Professor George Patton at Royal Children's Hospital
in Melbourne, Australia, was the lead author. The
study found that worldwide, more than two and a half
million people age ten to twenty-four died in two
thousand four. Nearly two-thirds were in sub-Saharan
Africa and Southeast Asia. Conditions related to
pregnancy and childbirth were a leading cause of
deaths in females. But for both sexes combined, the
leading killer in this age group was traffic
accidents.
Ten percent of all the deaths were blamed on road
injuries.Next came suicide and violence.
Also in the top ten causes were infections,
including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, as well as
drowning and fire-related deaths. The study appears
in the journal The Lancet.
And that's the VOA Special English Development
Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
