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UNITED NATIONS — It is unacceptable that 8.8 million children die every year before their fifth birthday — 40 percent of them in India, Nigeria and Congo, the U.N. children’s agency said Thursday.
New data released by UNICEF and published online in The Lancet, a British medical journal, show a continuing decline in the death rate for youngsters under the age of 5, a trend that has continued for the past two decades.
Progress has been seen in every part of the world. But UNICEF said the rate of improvement is not sufficient to reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goal of a two-thirds reduction in under-5 child mortality between 1990 and 2015.
The two leading causes of under-5 mortality are pneumonia and diarrhea, according to the data.
