Anup Shah from a page created Sunday, May 06, 2007
Today, over 27,000 children died around the world
Around the world, 27–30,000 children die every day.
That is equivalent to:
1 child dying every 3 seconds
20 children dying every minute
A 2004 Asian Tsunami occurring almost every week
An Iraq-scale death toll every 15–35 days
10–11 million children dying every year
Over 50 million children dying between 2000 and 2005
The silent killers are poverty, hunger, easily preventable diseases and illnesses, and other related causes. In spite of the scale of this daily/ongoing catastrophe, it rarely manages to achieve, much less sustain, prime-time, headline coverage.
Why is this tragedy not in the headlines?
Unfortunately, it seems that the world still does not notice. It might be reasonable to expect that death and tragedy on this scale should be prime time headlines news. Yet, these issues only surface when there are global meetings or concerts (such as the various G8 summits, the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005, etc).
Furthermore, year after year, we witness that when those campaigns end and the meetings conclude, so does the mainstream media coverage. It feels as though even when there is some media attention, the ones who suffer are not the ones that compel the mainstream to report, but instead it is the movement of the celebrities and leaders of the wealthy countries that makes this issue newsworthy.
Even rarer in the mainstream media is any thought that wealthy countries may be part of the problem too. The effects of international policies, the current form of globalization, and the influence the wealthy countries have on these processes is rarely looked at.
Instead, promises and pledges from the wealthy, powerful countries, and the corruption of the poorer ones—who receive apparently abundant goodwill—make the headlines; the repeated broken promises, the low quality and quantity of aid, and conditions with unfair strings attached do not.
Read the entire article at Global Issues.
The Global Issues web site looks into issues that affect everyone. There are over 550 articles on poverty, globalization, human rights, geopolitics, and the environment. A nice humane effort here by Anup Shah.
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