World S Children

Despite the death toll exacted by civil war, poverty and drought, developing nations have generally improved the health of their children through increased immunization, improved primary care and simple techniques like adding iodine to salt.The annual "State of the World's Children" report, released yesterday by UNICEF, said that by next year, 2.5 million fewer children would be dying annually from malnutrition and preventable diseases than died in 1990. Also, 750,000 fewer youngsters each year will be disabled, blinded, crippled or mentally retarded.

The woman, a Nigerian mother named Busayo, fought back tears as she recalled going into debt in a futile attempt to treat her infant son's pneumonia. After Busayo spent all of her family's savings — she even sold the family cell phone — the 2-month-old died. Speaking just above a whisper, the woman was sitting in a small rural church in Nigeria talking with Dr. Orin Levine, who was being featured in the British documentary "Kill or Cure?" "That really stuck with me," said Levine, the 44-year-old executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC)

UNLESS immediate action is taken, by the year 2000 one-third of the world's children between 5 and 16 will be living on the street.Street children and the host of other problems facing children, including those in the United States, have prompted UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund, to organize a "World Summit for Children" this weekend in New York. President Bush is among 70 heads of state (probably the largest gathering of heads of state in history) committed to attend the first-ever PageHuidekoperWilsonworld conference on children.

Americans are generous people. To see our generosity, one need only look at the outpouring of aid in response to natural disasters. From the earthquake in Haiti to flooding in Tennessee to the Gulf Coast oil spill, when Americans see people in need, they don't hesitate to help. Working in global health, we often witness human tragedy on an overwhelming scale. Yet because the burden of infectious disease is constant rather than the result of one terrible event, the scope of the problem evades the front-page headlines and the public consciousness.

MORE THAN 70 heads of state -- presidents, prime ministers and kings -- will meet at the United Nations the end of this month to end a war. The battlefields will see no blood because the final struggles will be fought in classrooms, clinics and homes of the world.The World Summit for Children will set forth a crusade to take our children into the 21st century with a mandate to be healthy, educated and productive.Who will be the leaders? Every mayor of every town on Earth. Every public health professional in the field.

I RECENTLY met a lean young boy named Natake on a small Pacific island near no other. He accompanied me as I explored his tiny homeland, with its landscape ravaged by the phosphate industry.As we walked among land that had been stripped of trees, through a ghostly abandoned warehouse, around rusting cars and trucks, Natake said nothing. True, I was a stranger. And, true, we did not speak the same language. But at each stop we made, Natake's eyes bespoke bewilderment."Why do you care about these things?"

London. - "We have already traveled three-quarters of the way toward a world in which every man, woman and child has adequate food, safe water, basic health care and primary education. There is no financial or technological barrier to prevent the completion of this journey in our times,'' announces James Grant, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund, in its annual report ''The State of the World's Children.''Why aren't we completing the other 25 per cent of this remarkable journey that has transformed the well-being of most of the world in this century?

THE news reports concentrated on the costs of policing the globe, on the United States' place in the New World Order and on the United Nations' role in hot spots from Bosnia to Somalia.All of those, of course, are legitimate issues of grave magnitude, and I expected President Clinton would wax eloquent on them in his address to the United Nations last week.Yet none of the half-dozen news reports I saw mentioned what Mr. Clinton said about the most critical issue facing the leaders of the world today -- the unconscionable deaths of children from preventable diseases and hunger, at home and abroad.

PPE: It may sound like a utility company, but it's shorthand for poverty, population growth and environmental stress -- the formula for a downward spiral toward greater human misery for millions of people around the world. James Grant, director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), cites the "PPE spiral" in the fund's annual "State of the World's Children" report,released this week.In many ways, improving the lives of the world's children is too easy, simply because needs are so great that almost any positive effort can make a measurable difference.

MORE THAN half the world's children face a future of certain deprivation. Orphaned by poverty, AIDS or war. Abducted into the armies of warlords. Sold into the sex trade. Exploited by labor crews. Maimed by landmines. As described in UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 2005, children are suffering mightily and governments are to blame for much of their despair. The examples are numerous. As militias displace families and children in western Darfur, Sudanese officials have yet to disarm them.

Lord, I have only one wish: May 2008 be a better year for the world's children. The year we are about to leave has been another brutal one for the small and defenseless in our midst. The suffering of children has been lamented throughout history, causing biblical prophets to issue warnings that God would rain fire and brimstone on whoever harms widows and orphans. Charles Dickens' portrayals of starving, dirty-faced urchins toiling for pennies in London slums prompted governments to enact laws against child labor.

President Bush's recently proposed budget included a $123 million assistance package to fund UNICEF's health, education and protection programs throughout the world this coming fiscal year. We applaud the president for this decision and hope Congress will follow his lead. Allocating funds to secure the health and safety of children is an important step toward the creation of a healthier, safer world. Yet, while multimillion-dollar budget allocations are generous and crucial to UNICEF's efforts, the United States could take an additional simple, crucial step toward improving the state of the world's children.

When an old college friend invited Thibault Manekin to teach basketball to teenagers in Durban, South Africa, Manekin thought of The Air Up There, a comedy about a naive American's search for a hoops star in remote Africa. But Manekin quickly learned that his friend's program had a serious goal - to use basketball to teach children -black, white and Indian - to see beyond their differences amid the fragile race relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Four years later, the program, called Playing for Peace, has expanded from South Africa to Northern Ireland, bridging barriers in communities historically separated by strife.

MORE THAN half the world's children face a future of certain deprivation. Orphaned by poverty, AIDS or war. Abducted into the armies of warlords. Sold into the sex trade. Exploited by labor crews. Maimed by landmines. As described in UNICEF's The State of the World's Children 2005, children are suffering mightily and governments are to blame for much of their despair. The examples are numerous. As militias displace families and children in western Darfur, Sudanese officials have yet to disarm them.

Peter Ustinov, who died Sunday at his home in Switzerland at age 82, resembled a cross between an English bulldog and a teddy bear - imposing, but adorable; refined, but mischievious. In the annals of great British actors, he'll go down as Shakespearean, with a touch of Monty Python. "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious," Ustinov was reported to have once said, offering a wry and typically dexterous summation of his life and career. The actor, whose movie career spanned more than 60 years, from 1942's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing to 2003's Luther, died of heart failure at a Swiss clinic near his home in Bursins.

WE HAVE failed miserably. Every day our children face terrible dangers, and yet we do nothing to protect them. At this moment, an innocent child somewhere in this wealthiest nation in the history of mankind is balanced precariously on a sturdy bike with training wheels so huge that gale-force winds couldn't tip the thing over, wearing nothing but a helmet, goggles, elbow pads, biking gloves, kneepads, shin guards, sunscreen and bug repellent. Shame! Shame on us for putting our children at such horrible risk of, of something ... something really bad!

London. -- No famine, no war, no flood, no earthquake has ever claimed the lives of 250,000 children in a single week. Yet malnutrition and disease claim that number of the world's children every seven days. That is the first consideration.The second, as UNICEF's newly published ''State of the World's Children'' makes plain, is that for a mere $25 billion it would now be possible ''to control the major childhood diseases, eradicate polio, halve child malnutrition, bring clean water to all communities, provide a basic education for every child, and make family planning available to all couples.

You'd expect a swanky downtown hotel to have priceless works of art on its walls. And the Hyatt Regency has them. This week, drawings, collages, paintings, and even pottery created by children from around the world are on display at an international educators' conference. There's a watercolor brushed by a Nepali teen, and a fabric flag painted by Korean students. Finnish children replicated an image familiar to them -- snowmen, carefully constructed from cotton. There are fold-out books, pictures fashioned from leaves and insect-like images created from foam pellets, all created by youngsters aged 3 to 15. And alongside the artworks are photographs of the children at work, and in some cases, biographical information about them.

Seth Davis, age 4 1/2 , is Superman, except for those days when he's Batman or maybe Robin."Yesterday, he was Robin, his dad was Batman and I was Batgirl," said his mother, Sara Peterson Davis, who lives in Kansas. "His little sister was Batbaby, and his grandpa was Commissioner Gordon. He really gets into it, and we have to play along."That's just as it should be, experts say. Parents with highly imaginative preschoolers need to allow them their fantasies about superheroes or animals or imaginary friends.