The Lancet's review: Closing the killer gap in children's health inequality
Last week World Vision launched a compelling new report that identifed ‘devastating’ gaps that exist between the health rich and health poor in every country. These gaps contribute to the deaths of thousands of children every day.
The report 'The Killer Gap: A Global Index of Health Inequality for Children' (Download here) assesses 176 countries around the world against four indicators and ranks them according to the size of the gap between those who have good access to health services and those who don’t.
Earlier today a new editorial from The Lancet reviewed the report, ensuring the conversation stays active in the wider global health community.
"The Lancet's review supports our calls for greater attention to be paid to health inequalities at the highest political level and rightly points out that it will take all our collective efforts to help close these gaps" said Kate Eardley, Senior Child Health Policy Advisor, World Vision International.
This comes as UNICEF yesterday reported that child deaths have been almost cut in half, from 12.6 million per year in 1990 to to 6.6 million in 2012. Despite this welcome progress the Killer Gap report shows that millions of children, including the 6.6 million who sadly died in 2012, are still not benefitting from improvements.