ONE - A Face Behind The Numbers

One life…one dollar!

Not a bad deal.

If you were told that you could save a child’s life for a dollar, you would do it in a heartbeat.  The senseless reality is that millions of children in developing nations are dying because they cannot afford, or cannot access, an immunization that only costs one dollar.

When hundreds of thousands of people die in a hurricane or tsunami, the world seems to stand still.  It seems so unfair that ‘mother nature’ would deal those cards to innocent, unsuspecting people.  The element of surprise, combined with the fact that nothing could have prevented it, seems to create an eerie sense of awe.  What, then, do we feel when more people die as a result of something that is completely preventable?

The only word to describe this is Injustice.

Have you ever had diarrhea? So have 300,000 poor children. They died of it, this year. Almost 11 million children under age 5 died in 2000, mostly from preventable diseases.
Stop, read that again. Nearly 11 million under the age of 5 died in 2000, mostly from preventable diseases. The Boeing 747-100SR airplane seats 550 people. It is like stacking a 747-100SR full of kids and then downing it into the ocean, every 24 minutes, every hour, every day, every week of the year. Have a nice sleep tonight.
How do we know that it’s not getting any better? Because 97 percent of the world’s population growth takes place in the developing world. This is true despite the sad fact that the infant mortality rate per 1000 births is 7 in northern Europe, 51 in South America, and 108 in Eastern Africa.

There are 2.1 billion children in the world, accounting for 36% of the world’s population. Some 132 million children are born each year. One of every 12 children dies before they reach five, mostly from preventable causes.

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