Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005
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Thiruvananthapuram
By Our Staff Reporter
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, JAN. 11. Deaths of newborns, diarrhoea and respiratory infections are the three major child health issues that India has to tackle urgently, Jane G. Schaller, the executive director of International Paediatric Association (IPA) and professor emeritus of paediatrics, Tufts University, Boston, U.S. has said. Delivering a lecture on `Child health, survival and development,' at a function organised by the Child Development Centre, Medical College, today, she pointed out that while paediatrics was branching into various super specialities, in many parts of the world, millions of children lost their lives because basic healthcare needs were not being met by the system. The deaths were mostly due to illnesses that were preventable. About 2.4 million children under the age of four years die in India every year of illnesses that were either preventable or curable. About 1.2 million babies in the country do not survive the first month. She said that an international partnership had been formed, with the IPA and several international agencies like the UNICEF, WHO to tackle issues that affect the health and survival of children across the world. India had recently joined the partnership.
The issues
Some of the issues of child health in 2004 that the group had identified include children's environmental health; childhood respiratory diseases and tuberculosis, child health in humanitarian emergencies, especially the psycho-social impact of disasters in children; universal immunisation, vaccine-preventable diseases, survival of the new-born and HIV/AIDS. The other child health issues of 2004 include non-communicable diseases, birth defects, malignancies and congenital heart diseases. Violence committed against children, including sexual abuse, and the emergence of lifestyle diseases, especially obesity and poor physical fitness of children were two emerging areas of concern. India was doing a great job in tackling paediatric leukaemia and other childhood malignancies, Dr. Schaller said.
Major concerns
She pointed out that in the ways global health programmes were devised, the health needs of children were not addressed at all. There was also a lack of or poor distribution of specialised personnel for taking care of children with disabilities. A national consultation on Child Survival and Development held recently at New Delhi had also zoomed in on neo-natal mortality and respiratory infections as major concerns, as Dr. Schaller pointed out. It was suggested at the workshop that there was much potential to reduce mortality related to acute respiratory infections (ARI). It had been suggested that `wheezing' be included in the ARI management programme and to make nebulizer and spacers (inhalation medicine and apparatus) be made available at all health care facilities. Children with ARI should be identified and their disease managed aggressively, it was pointed out. The director of the Child Development Centre, M.K.C. Nair, the Director of Medical Education, Meenu Hariharan, and the Principal of the Medical College, G. Sujathan, were among those who spoke at the function.
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