Peter Miva & Dulcie Oreke Aihi; 13/8/08
The Angau Memorial Hospital morgue in Lae is filled beyond its holding capacity with unclaimed dead bodies, prompting hospital management to call on relatives to collect them quickly. In response to queries raised about the morgue, the hospital’s public relations office confirmed yesterday that there were currently more than 70 bodies crammed into the morgue. About 20 of them were children.
See: http://www.thenational.com.pg/081308/nation9.php
Tragic child death rate
Titled The State of Asia Pacific’s Children 2008, shows that our country has the highest level of under five-year-old deaths in the South Pacific. The figures are, in this day and age, alarming; Unicef quotes 73 deaths per 1,000 births as the current Papua New Guinea level. Given that PNG has now passed the halfway time span towards meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of 2015 to cut the child death rate by two thirds, the challenge appears almost non-achievable. There is no mystery about the cause of these deaths. A burgeoning child birth rate adds extra stress to an already inadequate system of child birth facilities, particularly in more inaccessible and remote areas. The long-established threats to the survival of the young PNG child remain depressingly the same – pneumonia, diarrhoea and malnutrition.
See: http://www.thenational.com.pg/081308/lead_editorial.php
Tags: Child Death Rate, Death & Burial, PNG