Child Survival Rate Dropping Faster In Iraq Than Anywhere Else In World: Report

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

LONDON (AP) - The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age five has plummetted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, said a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, said the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.

Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 per cent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.

The report, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined gains in survival rates in some of the world's poorest countries - including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland - are declining.


Read more: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=cd36f98a-6c59-4830-93fb-836c6dbaacfd&k=76629

[burrowowl]

1. K&R

When do we start calling this immoral war genocide?

[Solly Mack]

2. Feel safer yet America?

[lovuian]

3. its so sad

Its pretty obvious that mortality rates are increasing

[leftchick]

4. but the chimp is pro-life

oh yeah, I mean pro-fetus. :(

[Lenore]

7. As a Conservative Christian...

I feel it is my obligation to teach my children that Republicans absolutely loooove the Fetus yet clearly despise The Child....

[indepat]

8. How long will it be before the world media begin to attach the word genocide to the pro-life (fetus)

neocons' little war for freedom and democracy in Iraq?

[mzmolly]

5. Ahhh "progress?"

/sarcasm

:(

[Roland99]

6. Not just Bush is to blame but all of the UN. The sanctions from 1990 on were devastating.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

10. Were the mortality rates rising as fast between 1990 and 2003?

For some reason, I doubt it.

[Roland99]

11. Probably not but the sanctions are credited with the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

http://www.alternet.org/story/11933/

The grim question of how many people have died in Iraq has sparked heated debate over the years. The controversy dates from 1995, when researchers with a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study in Iraq wrote to The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, asserting that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children. The New York Times picked up the story and declared "Iraq Sanctions Kill Children." CBS followed up with a segment on 60 Minutes that repeated the numbers and depicted sanctions as a murderous assault on children. This was the program in which UN ambassador (and later Secretary of State) Madeleine Albright, when asked about these numbers, coldly stated, "The price is worth it."

Albright's comments were shocking, as were the numbers, but doubts were soon raised about their validity. A January 1996 letter to The Lancet found inconsistencies in the mortality figures. A follow-up study in 1996, using the same methodology, found much lower rates of child mortality. In October 1997 the authors of the initial letter wrote again to The Lancet, this time reporting that mortality rates in the follow-up study were "several-fold lower than the estimate for 1995--for unknown reasons." While the initial report of more than 567,000 deaths attracted major news coverage, the subsequent disavowal of those numbers passed unnoticed in the press.

The two most reliable scientific studies on sanctions in Iraq are the 1999 report "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children," by Columbia University's Richard Garfield, and "Sanctions and Childhood Mortality in Iraq," a May 2000 article by Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah in The Lancet. Garfield, an expert on the public-health impact of sanctions, conducted a comparative analysis of the more than two dozen major studies that have analyzed malnutrition and mortality figures in Iraq during the past decade. He estimated the most likely number of excess deaths among children under five years of age from 1990 through March 1998 to be 227,000. Garfield's analysis showed child mortality rates double those of the previous decade.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. Some freepoid will post something like this somewhere:

"Sweet! Less islamofascists! The War on Terror is working!"

You read it here first.