By Michael Kahn
LONDON (Reuters) - More than 9 million children globallydied before their fifth birthday in 2007, down slightly from2006, but a huge gap remains between rich and poor countries,especially in Africa, UNICEF said on Friday.
Efforts to promote breastfeeding, immunisations andanti-malaria measures have helped cut child deaths to 9.2million from 9.7 million a year ago and 12.7 million in 1990,the figures from the United Nations Children's Fund showed.
"Since 1960, the global under-five mortality rate hasdeclined more than 60 percent, and the new data shows thedownward trend continues," UNICEF Executive Director AnnVeneman said in a statement.
Improvements in Latin America and the Caribbean, Centraland Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and in parts ofAsia drove the overall decline, but deaths remain high insub-Saharan Africa where one in seven children dies before age5.
AIDS is still a major killer of children in sub-SaharanAfrica, though countries such as Eritrea, Malawi, Mozambique,Niger and Ethiopia have made significant progress in cuttingmortality rates, UNICEF said.
"Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for almost half of the 9.2million deaths among children in this age group annually,"according to the UNICEF report published in the journal Lancet.
"High levels of fertility...together with high levels ofmortality in children aged less than 5 years have led to anincrease in the absolute number of deaths (in this region)."
Worldwide, the death rate for children under age 5 was 68per 1,000 live births in 2007, down from the 93 per 1,000 in1990 and 72 per 1,000 a year ago.
Sierra Leone had the worst under-five mortality rate in theworld with 262 out of every 1,000 children dying before theirfifth birthday. The rate in industrialised nations was 6 per1,000.
A number of countries, including Laos, Bangladesh, Boliviaand Nepal, have also made good progress toward meeting globaltargets to reduce the child mortality rates by two-thirdsbetween 1990 and 2015, UNICEF said.
"Recent data also indicate encouraging improvements in manyof the basic health interventions, such as early and exclusivebreast feeding, measles immunisation, Vitamin Asupplementation, the use of insecticide-treated nets to preventmalaria, and prevention and treatment of AIDS," Veneman said.
"These interventions are expected to result in furtherdeclines in child mortality over the coming years."
(Reporting by Michael Kahn, Editing by Maggie Fox andRobert Hart)
