A mother's heart-rending story

 

 

Photo - nzherald.co.nz 

 

This heart rending experience of a totally unpreventable, mother and child-involved accident raises the awareness of those things that can just go wrong sometimes and it’s no one’s fault.

Theresa Vargas tells her brave story about an unthinkable, unpredictable and non-preventable accident that happened involving herself and her baby son.

She tells it in her own words, which is inspiring and thankfully, has a happy ending. See the link above from nzherald.co.nz

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11421754&ref=NZH_FBpage

For information from the World Health Organisation regarding accidents where children become injured and sometimes even die, go to: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr46/en/

As said, Theresa Vargas’ situation is a complete, non-preventable accident, with a good outcome.

However, the figures for unintentional child deaths are concerning world-wide:

A staggering number of more than 2000 children die every day as a result of unintentional or accidental injuries.

Every year tens of millions more worldwide are taken to hospitals with injuries that often leave them with lifelong disabilities, according to a new report by WHO and UNICEF.

The report, called World report on child injury prevention provides the first comprehensive global assessment of unintentional childhood injuries and prescribes measures to prevent them.

It concludes that if proven prevention measures were adopted everywhere at least 1000 children’s lives could be saved every day.

“Child injuries are an important public health and development issue. In addition to the 830,000 deaths every year, millions of children suffer non-fatal injuries that often require long-term hospitalisation and rehabilitation," says WHO director-general Dr Margaret Chan.

"The costs of such treatment can throw an entire family into poverty."

“This report is the result of a collaboration of more than 180 experts from all regions of the world,” says UNICEF executive director Ann M Veneman.

However, the report finds the rate is 10 times higher in Africa than in high-income countries in Europe and the Western Pacific such as Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom, which have the lowest rates of child injury.

However, the report finds that although many high-income countries have been able to reduce their child injury deaths by up to 50 percent over the past 30 years, the issue remains a problem for them, with unintentional injuries accounting for 40 percent of all child deaths in such countries.

 The report finds that the top five causes of injury deaths are:

• Road crashes: They kill 260,000 children a year and injure about 10 million. They are the leading cause of death among 10-19 year olds and a leading cause of child disability.
• Drowning: It kills more than 175,000 children a year. Every year, up to 3 million children survive a drowning incident. Due to brain damage in some survivors, non-fatal drowning has the highest average lifetime health and economic impact of any injury type.
• Burns: Fire-related burns kill nearly 96,000 children a year and the death rate is 11 times higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.
• Falls: Nearly 47,000 children fall to their deaths every year, but hundreds of thousands more sustain less serious injuries from a fall.
• Poisoning: More than 45,000 children die each year from unintended poisoning.