A new study from UNICEF has prompted a rash of sto­ries about pre­ventable dis­eases that kill chil­dren in the under-developed world. While most of the world focuses it’s atten­tion on erad­i­cat­ing AIDS, dis­eases such as diar­rhea and pneu­mo­nia kill mil­lions of chil­dren a year in the under-developed world.

Our snip­pet comes from Yahoo News, which we found as we signed into our e-mail this morn­ing. We were some­what sur­prised that they would put this story on their front page instead a celebrity piece. Asso­ci­ated Press writer Margie Mason gives us some sta­tis­tics from UNICEF.

Diar­rhea doesn’t make head­lines. Nor does pneu­mo­nia. AIDS and malaria tend to get most of the attention.

Yet even though cheap tools could pre­vent and cure both dis­eases, they kill an esti­mated 3.5 mil­lion kids under 5 each a year glob­ally — more than HIV and malaria combined.

“They have been neglected, because donor or part­ner­ship mech­a­nisms shifted their empha­sis to HIV and AIDS and other issues,” said Dr. Tes­faye Shiferaw, a UNICEF offi­cial in Africa. “These age-old tra­di­tional killers remain with us. The ones dying are the chil­dren of the poor.”

Global spend­ing on mater­nal, new­born and child health was about $3.5 bil­lion in 2006, accord­ing to a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion. That same year, nearly $9 bil­lion was devoted to HIV and AIDS, accord­ing to UNAIDS.

Pneu­mo­nia is the biggest killer of chil­dren under 5, claim­ing more then 2 mil­lion lives annu­ally or about 20 per­cent of all child deaths. AIDS, in con­trast, accounts for about 2 percent.

If iden­ti­fied early, pneu­mo­nia can be treated with inex­pen­sive antibi­otics. Yet UNICEF and the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion esti­mate less than 20 per­cent of those sick­ened receive the drugs.

A vac­cine has been avail­able since 2000 but has not yet reached many chil­dren in devel­op­ing coun­tries. The GAVI Alliance, a global part­ner­ship, hopes to intro­duce it to 42 coun­tries by 2015.

Diar­rheal dis­eases, such as cholera and rotavirus, kill 1.5 mil­lion kids each year, most under 2 years old. The chil­dren die from dehy­dra­tion, weak­ened immune sys­tems and mal­nu­tri­tion. Often they get sick from drink­ing dirty water.

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