New Year welcomes 8,000+ new Bangladesh babies


FE Team | Published: January 01, 2018 22:33:37 | Updated: January 02, 2018 13:14:32


New Year welcomes 8,000+ new Bangladesh babies

Nearly 8,370 babies were expected to be born in Bangladesh on the New Year's day (January 1).

UNICEF came up with the disclosure on Monday, saying that the new babies will account for 2.17 per cent of the estimated 385,793 babies expected to be born globally on the New Year's day.

The report says India will have 69,070 new faces on the same day while Pakistan 14,910. "While many babies will survive, some will not make it past their first day."

According to the report, an estimated 2,600 children died within the first 24 hours every day in the year 2016. For almost two million newborns, their first week was also their last.

In all, 2.6 million children died before the end of their first month.

More than 80 per cent of all newborn deaths among the children are due to preventable and treatable causes such as premature birth, complications during delivery and infections like sepsis and pneumonia.

UNICEF representative in Bangladesh Edouard Beigbeder said, "This New Year, UNICEF's resolution is to help give every child more than an hour, more than a day, more than a month - more than survival."

Also, he has called upon the governments and development partners to join the fight to save millions of children's lives by providing proven, low-cost solutions.

BSS says the world over the past two decades has seen unprecedented progress in child survival, halving the number of children worldwide who died before their fifth birthday to 5.6 million in 2016. But despite these advances, there has been slower progress for newborns. Babies dying in the first month account for 46 per cent of all deaths among children under five.

UNICEF will launch next month "Every Child Alive", a global campaign to demand and deliver affordable, quality health care solutions for every mother and newborn. These include a steady supply of clean water and electricity at health facilities, the presence of a skilled health attendant during birth, disinfecting the umbilical cord, breastfeeding within the first hour after birth, and skin-to-skin contact between the mother and child.

According to Beigbeder, "We are now entering the era when the entire world's newborns should have the opportunity to see the 22nd Century."

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