& Exposition
| 3rd World Congress & Exposition |
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| Daily Summary: A World Fit for Children
-May 11, 2003- | ||
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The health problems facing the world's children and youth could be solved easily and inexpensively with vision, leadership, and engagement of young people in the process. This was the point emerging most often from Sunday's opening plenary. On one hand, Kul Gautam, Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, noted that 13 million fewer children were born and 4 million fewer died in the last year of the 1990s than in the first. But in a reversal of usual trends, children in sub-Saharan Africa can now expect to live shorter lives than their parents. Changing this need not be costly. For example, each night, only two percent of African children go to sleep under a $3 mosquito net, yet millions of African children die annually of malaria. The deaths of so many children of preventable causes with affordable solutions "should outrage us more than it appears to do," said Gautam. But if Gautam opened the congress on a sobering note, the young people who followed him provided cause for hope. Against the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine," 11-year-old Ryan Hreljac told how, at age six, he did chores to raise the $70 cost of drilling a single well for clean water in an African village. In so doing, he launched Ryan's Well Foundation, which has helped CIDA raise $750,000 and is involved in about 18 well projects across the African continent. "Kids can make a difference, but adults need to help, and they need to help now," said Hreljac. That is the goal of a separate initiative called Gathering Storm. Operating on the "butterfly theory" - that even the smallest beating of wings in one part of the world can create a storm of change elsewhere - 30 young people from around the world will participate throughout the Congress. At a youth-only session on Saturday, they produced a list of their key concerns - malnutrition, sexual and reproductive health, abuse and exploitation - and spoke to the vital importance of engaging children and youth in finding solutions to the problems they face. Commented Senator Landon Pearson, it is the authenticity of young people's commitment to what they believe in that lends power to their voices, and attending to those voices will be among the most powerful acts that adult delegates to the Congress can commit in the coming days.
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| Conference Snapshots | ||
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This is a time of extraordinary change, a time when what happens in a distant province in southern China can within weeks affect lives in North America. In just three weeks, researchers have gone from describing a new disease to identifying its DNA sequence. Yet this has not stopped anyone in China from getting the disease or dying of it. This highlights economic disparities, and no group is more affected than children. Discovery is not enough. We also need methods for transforming research into action. Science can only flourish where human rights and the lives of children flourish. --Alan Bernstein, President, CIHR, "Achieving a World Fit for Children" Although there have been successes in the removal of chemical environmental toxins such as the elimination of lead from gasoline, a lot of work still needs to be done in the area of environmental affects of chemicals on children's health. Many African countries still permit lead to be added to gasoline. The affects of chemicals such as mercury and PCBs need more investigation. An important step will be to o beyond studying the effects of individual chemicals and look at the interaction of different chemicals. --Irene Buka, Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, University of Alberta, "Environment/Child Health: What Science is Telling Us" In sub-Saharan Africa, HIV seroprevalence among newborns born to HIV+ mothers ranges from 17 to 45 percent as compared with one percent in the US. Giving ARV drugs to the mother in early labour and the newborn is extremely effective. There is a tension between public health workers who hope that mothers will return post-partum if they are promised the drug for their babies at that time, but the mothers rarely return. It makes sense to give the baby's does to the mother on the one visit she is likely to make to the clinic.
Another effective strategy is to provide counseling on a range of issues to all women who attend the clinic, and then allow them to opt out of HIV testing if they wish. Acceptance of testing is excellent after counseling, but even where mothers refuse, we must consider sending the drug home with them anyways, because evidence suggests that enough will take it without knowing their status to make it worthwhile.
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