Equity and child-survival strategies

Abstract

In human rights law, the term 'equity' is used to represent equality with fairness. This is synonymous with the notion of distributive justice, or fair distribution of good things within a society, whether they be material possessions, access to health care, or simply survival. There is nothing that highlights the inequity of our world more starkly than child mortality, and we believe that pneumonia is the cause of childhood death that most strongly reflects this inequity. Between countries the differences in child mortality rates are enormous and well documented. For a child born today, the risk of death in the first 5 years of life in Japan is 6 per 1000, while in Afghanistan, Angola and Sierra Leone the risk is over 40 times as great. This is considering survival only; the chances of a child fulfilling their cognitive and growth potential are similarly inequitable.