Nearly 4 million youngsters who would have perished from diseases such as whooping cough and measles under world conditions a decade ago were saved by immunizations in 1993, a U.N. report said Tuesday.
The report, "State of the World's Children," appears to be the most optimistic survey ever by the U.N. Children's Fund."A momentum has been building up behind a great change for children," UNICEF's executive director, James P. Grant, said Monday.
A copy of the report was being given to President Clinton Tuesday in a White House ceremony.
Grant credited international private and government immunization programs, disease research and social reform efforts with helping children survive.
He said an increase in immunizations, from 20 percent in the early 1980s to nearly 80 percent today, represents "the greatest public health achievement of this or any other century."
The report called for more effort to end malnutrition, illiteracy and disease with more focus on wom-en and children. A fifth of the world's families still live in absolute poverty, the report said.
The UNICEF report lists big advances against five diseases that kill 8 million children a year: measles, diarrhea, whooping cough, tetanus and pneumonia.
Measles still kills more children every year than all the world's wars and famines put together, but the toll has dropped from 2.5 million a year a decade ago to 1 million a year now, the report said. Nonfatal measles cases have dropped from 75 million a year to 25 million.
The report also said the toll from dehydration caused by diarrheal disease has been cut from 4 million to 2.9 million, deaths from whooping cough from 700,000 to 400,000 and from neonatal tetanus from 1.1 million to 600,000. Deaths from pneumonia have dropped from 3.3 million to 3.1 million.
These results came despite a 20 percent rise in the world population of children under 5.
No new cases of polio have been reported in the Western Hemisphere for the past two years, the report said, and the number of cases is down from 360,000 in 1983 to 140,000 last year worldwide.
"Over 3 million children are running and playing normally who would have been crippled," Grant said.
The report cited several other signs of progress:
- Large-scale programs in Africa and India show that malnutrition among children under 5 can be cut in half by the end of the decade. The world has sufficient food supplies, but one in three children still is not properly fed.
- Family planning is spreading, particularly in Asia, but it is practiced by fewer than 10 percent of couples in most of Africa.
- The mid-decade goal of iodizing all salt to be consumed by humans as a way of preventing some mental and physical impairments in children is within reach.
Even the bad news for children - particularly their abuse in the workplace, on the street and in the home - may be reduced by an emerging ethic that puts children first, protecting them from "the worst evils of the adult world," the report said.