A misleading headline

“Fewer children are dying worldwide”.

The number of children dying worldwide has dropped below 10 million a year for the first time, UNICEF said Thursday.

“More children are surviving today than ever before,” said Ann Veneman, UNICEF’s executive director.

New data from the UN Children’s Fund suggests that life-saving measures like vitamin A supplementation, insect nets and vaccines are reaching more children than ever in poor countries. Global child deaths fell to 9.7 million in 2005, down from nearly 13 million in 1990.

So it’s true that more children who are born are surviving today because of life-saving measures.

Or is it….?

But some experts questioned UNICEF’S interpretation of the data.

“Considering all the tools we have for child survival, we are not doing better at reducing child mortality now than we were three decades ago,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Murray is the lead author of a paper to be published in two weeks in the medical journal, The Lancet. The paper casts doubt on the data collection methods used by UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Many information sources for child mortality are either out of date or missing from the U.N.’s database, according to the paper. And because U.N. organizations are required to use data provided by governments, there are limits on how credible such information is.

And then there are the other numbers these studies don’t even consider, the unspoken numbers of children lost to abortion. (Scroll down to the middle of that site for the current number on the meter. As of the moment this is posted, it stood at 48,161,347.)