diarrhoea

As reports come in on flooding now entering central Bangkok, children are falling ill from diseases such as severe diarrhoea, with thousands more at risk as exposure from filthy floodwaters is on the rise. Our assessment teams have found that running water has been completely cut off from some areas. Even in some evacuation centres where some families have fled to there is no access to clean water.

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No parent should have to watch their child die. One of the first mothers I met in Sigale camp, Mogadishu, told me how she had had to do just that.

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Thank you Save the Children and thank you to everyone who supports you. No Child Born To Die tells a profound story. Too many young lives are lost to preventable diseases.

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There’s a cruel irony at play in flood-affected Pakistan. Despite being swamped by billions of litres of water, children and families cannot get enough safe water.

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I just read the latest blog by my friend Genevieve Rasle. While I was celebrating 5,400 lives being saved, she experienced the sheer horror of one life being lost. Reading her post made my hair stand on end.

Go and read it now, then come back.

Ginny’s absolutely right. Every preventable death is a death too many. No child should be dying in 2010 from diarrhoea, measles, pneumonia, malaria. It’s insane.

Almost 10 million children die each year from conditions that are simple to prevent and treat. That’s a huge number, impossible to imagine.

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I’m working on a health proposal today; pulling together information from our work, reports, the internet, the news.

Malnutrition rates have broken the emergency threshold. Not far from here the number of children who die before they are five is at one and half times the emergency level, and almost three times the average for sub-saharan Africa.

But, despite all this, I’m feeling really optimistic. I genuinely think this situation can be changed. Nothing here feels like a basket case, a black hole. It feels like a place stuffed with potential and possibility, just waiting for a chance to shine.

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I am at the GAVI Partners’ Forum in Hanoi – looking at how this UN-backed initiative needs to expand access to vaccines and immunisation programmes and to engage civil society in its governance and operations.

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