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By Rommel C. Lontayao, Reporter
The Department of Health (DOH) has launched a
campaign that intends to inform local government units (LGUs) and
mothers on child survival as a reaction to a challenge posed by the
United Nations Children’s Fund to cut down the mortality of kids
aged five and below.
DOH will give away leaflets to LGUs and parents.
Under its program “Garantisadong Pambata,” an institutionalized
nationwide Preschoolers Health Campaign, a package of health
services and relevant health information is delivered twice a year
to under-five- year old children.
Also under the program, the DOH will
distribute Vitamin A and de-worming medicines to children, and
breastfeeding information to lactating mothers.
The health department highlights the
following child survival methods in its campaign: skilled attendance
during pregnancy; delivery and immediate postpartum; care of the
newborn; breastfeeding and complementary feeding; micronutrient
supplementation and de-worming; immunization of children and
mothers; integrated management of sick children; child injury
prevention and control; and birth spacing.
The DOH said the campaign’s main goals is to
reduce under-five mortality rate by two-thirds, from 80 per 1,000
live births in 1993, to 26.7 per 1,000 live births by 2015 and to
institutionalize the eight child survival intervention by the said
year.
According to the DOH, the total under five-year
old mortality rate in the Philippines is pegged at 42 per 1,000 live
births. It further said that 30 out of these 1,000 live births die
even before the child’s first birthday, while 17 of them die
before they complete their first 28 days after being born.
The leading causes of under-five child
mortality, the DOH bared, are mainly of neonatal death-related
factors like injuries and diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, and
measles.
Undernutrition, however, ac-counts for more than
half of all child deaths.
“The root cause of ill health among children
continues to be poverty and the resulting inequity of access to the
means for better health,” the DOH report noted.
UNICEF said the Philippines is one of the 60
countries being prioritized by a global initiative called Countdown
to 2015, which tracks the progress of the countries toward achieving
the goal of reducing child deaths by 66 percent.
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