26,500 Children Died Today

This column is in response to Mr. Anup Shah's distressing piece from www.globalissues.org.

According to the website, at least 26,500 children die daily around the world! This means:

1 child dying every 3 seconds

18 children dying every minute

A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring every week

An Iraq-scale death toll every 15–36 days

Almost 10 million children dying every year

Some 60 million children that have died between 2000 and 2006

The killers are imperative global issues that often take a back seat in the media as compared to the more ´newsworthy´ headlines such as "What´s Paris Hilton´s next fashion statement?"

Topics like poverty; hunger and diseases that are quite preventable in the 21st century hardly make a sustainable impact amongst today´s media audiences.

The culprits behind these calamitous events include globalization, heavy weight industries and their international policies, alongside, pollution and national negligence.

Are the vows made by the first world countries to aid the more peripheral ones in effect? Has the corruption in the third world nations subsided? These are the questions left unanswered in mainstream media. Why?

"Imagine the horror of the world if a major earthquake were to occur and people stood by and watched without assisting the survivors! Yet every day, the equivalent of a major earthquake killing over 30,000 young children occurs to a disturbingly muted response. They die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death." (UNICEF, Progress of Nations 2000)

Is the plight of millions of children not in need of daily media attention? Consider Africa for instance, a country that endures more social upheavals than any other alone – in the year of 2003, more than half a million children died of measles when in fact effective immunization cost less than US$0.30, and has been available for the last 40 years.

Malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis and other infections have also been main sources of conflict. Why so many needless deaths? Is the global health care system failing? Is there a lack of funds in health banks? It would be all too typical to plant all the blame on the global economic downturn at this point of time given the scale of this ongoing catastrophe for decades.

Millions of dollars are spent on cosmetic developments, advertising and research to prolong the advancement of life...let alone save one?

For a known fact, children are god given...they determine our future to come. Every life makes a difference, and every stance made to save it, is prolific.

It would be harsh to say that the media world is one of the causes of child loss, but their influence is obvious.

Are we too petrified to face the truth? Are we afraid to come to terms with the much-shielded reality we live in? Are we too absorbed with our own daily burdens that everything else seems irrelevant?

YES! What do we do then? How can we play a part?

Now that's something to work on.

G.K. Sanghar