30,000 children
every day die from diseases that could be treated if they lived in another part of the world. In the United States,
and many other countries in the world, children are given vaccinations keeping them safe from diseases such as polio
and small pox, but this doesn't happen everywhere.
Making sure kids are vaccinated for certain diseases is improving in developing nations. Now the world can say
the crippling effects of polio have almost been wiped from the face of the earth, but this is not true for many other preventable
illnesses.
Many children contract deadly bacterial infections because they are exposed to open sewage. Lack of proper sewage treatment
means many people must throw their waste into the gutters spilling over onto where children play.
The lack of clean water is also a major factor in the spread of disease. In many places around the world there
is no clean water to drink. If you drink dirty water you can become from very sick from all of the bad bacteria hidden inside
of it.
If there is no clean water to drink that also means there is no clean water to wash your
hands. When kids come inside to eat, after playing outside all day, they don't even have clean water to
wash their hands. Germs travel from their hands to their mouths making it easy for them to become sick.
When bad bacteria enters your body, either through unclean drinking water or your unclean hands touching
your mouth, it can give you diarrhea. Chronic diarrhea kills 3.5 million people each year. Most of those deaths are children.
Proper medical care and immunization is the key to preventing disease and education is the key to understanding how
to stay healthy. Survival rates are twice as high if you are educated than it is for those children and mothers who have no
education.
…AND ONE WOMAN EVERY MINUTE DIES
Proper pre-natal medical care for mothers-to-be would also reduce childhood deaths and death
of the mother during child birth.
Pre-natal care is the type of doctor care a pregnant mother gets before she has her baby. The doctor will make
sure the mother is eating well and getting all the right vitamins. The doctor will also check to see if the baby is growing
at the right rate inside the mother and if something goes wrong the doctor will be able to help keep the mother and baby safe.
The poorest women in the world have no access to pre-natal care.
Every year 1.5 million women die from complications during pregnancy or complications while giving birth.
99% of those women are in developing nations.
Many millions of women, if they do survive the birth of their child, will suffer life long complications from
something that went wrong.
These deaths and life-long complications could be drastically reduced if the mother had
access to proper pre-natal care.
