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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
This is the VOA Special English Development Report.
Children eat sugar cane1 near their home in Kumbali, Malawi earlier this year. UNICEF says the southern African country is among those where the child death rate is improving.
UNICEF says the death rate for children under the age of five has fallen twenty-eight percent since nineteen ninety. Experts credit the drop to improvements in public health measures. These include vaccination2 campaigns and the use of bed nets chemically treated to kill mosquitoes that spread malaria3.
Still, Brian Hansford at the United Nations Children's Fund says more work remains4.
BRIAN HANSFORD: "Certainly the good news is that the rate of deaths of children under five years of age continued to decline in two thousand eight. The absolute number of child deaths declined to an estimated eight-point-eight million from twelve-point-five million in nineteen ninety. Compared to nineteen ninety, ten thousand fewer children are dying each day. The bad news is that an annual death total of eight-point-eight million is still a tragedy, and so there's still much to do."
One of the U.N. Millennium5 Development Goals is to reduce the under-five death rate by two-thirds by two thousand fifteen. One country that could reach this goal is Malawi. In nineteen ninety, there were two hundred twenty-five deaths for every one thousand live births. The estimate for last year was one hundred deaths.
UNICEF spokesman Brian Hansford says pneumonia6 and diarrhea remain the world's two greatest killers8 of young children. Ninety-three percent of the deaths happen in Africa and Asia.
A separate new study looked at deaths worldwide in young people age ten to twenty-four. It found that ninety-seven percent happen in low and middle income countries. And two out of every five are the result of injuries and violence.
Professor George Patton at Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, was the lead author.
GEORGE PATTON: "In high income countries such as the United States, the U.K. and Australia, death rates are around forty-five per hundred thousand per year. In sub-Saharan Africa we have the highest death rates in the world, and they are around seven times higher than that."
The study found that worldwide, more than two and a half million people age ten to twenty-four died in two thousand four. Nearly two-thirds were in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Conditions related to pregnancy9 and childbirth were a leading cause of deaths in females. But for both sexes combined, the leading killer7 in this age group was traffic accidents. Ten percent of all the deaths were blamed on road injuries.
Next came suicide and violence. Also in the top ten causes were infections, including tuberculosis10 and H.I.V./AIDS, as well as drowning and fire-related deaths. The study appears in the journal The Lancet.
And that's the VOA Special English Development Report, written by June Simms. I'm Steve Ember.
1 cane | |
n.手杖,细长的茎,藤条;v.以杖击,以藤编制的 | |
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2 vaccination | |
n.接种疫苗,种痘 | |
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3 malaria | |
n.疟疾 | |
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4 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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5 millennium | |
n.一千年,千禧年;太平盛世 | |
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6 pneumonia | |
n.肺炎 | |
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7 killer | |
n.杀人者,杀人犯,杀手,屠杀者 | |
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8 killers | |
凶手( killer的名词复数 ); 消灭…者; 致命物; 极难的事 | |
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9 pregnancy | |
n.怀孕,怀孕期 | |
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10 tuberculosis | |
n.结核病,肺结核 | |
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