In recent weeks we've seen just how devastating natural disasters can be. Lives that at one moment continued as they had for many years, in the next moment were irreversibly altered as a tsunami, an earthquake and continuing floods wreaked havoc in South East Asia and the Pacific region.
While these events are tragic and overwhelming in their destruction, other more subtle killers carry out their own devastation far away from our television screens and newsprint. But they leave a death toll far in excess of what we have recently seen.
In mid-September a joint group from UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and the United Nations Population Division, released the mortality figures for 2008 of children under five. The central statistic was that last year 65 children out of every thousand died before the age of five. That translates to 8.8 million children.
Although 8.8 million children is an enormous figure, there is some consolation in the knowledge that there could have been many more. In 1990, for example, the global child mortality rate was 90 deaths per 1000 live births or 12.5 million children. Comparing the two figures we see that today 10,000 fewer children die every day than did nearly 20 years ago. Still, it is frustrating to know how easily preventable most of those 8.8 million deaths were.
Reducing child mortality is one of eight Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations as a benchmark for progress across specific humanitarian areas.
For child mortality, the goal is to reduce 1990's rate by two thirds by 2015. The reduction currently sits at 28 per cent and while seemingly a long way off target, the rate has continually decreased and is now reducing rapidly.
But another Millennium Development Goal, the eradication of hunger, has become a possible harbinger for a tragic future. Hunger, like child mortality, was also on a continuing decline. Not now. In 2008, it reversed for the first time since 1990. Current estimates suggest that 100 million people have been forced back into poverty, and subsequently hunger, as a direct result of rising food and fuel prices and the onset of the global financial crisis.
While the child mortality figures are believed to be the lowest in world history, it is feared that next year's figures will tell a horrifying story. Food and fuel prices have backed off but remain high, and the full impact of the global financial