Better Odds on Youngsters

The health of U.S. children has never been better. The death rate of children (age i to 14) is at a record low. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. reports that in the past 15 years the child death rate has dropped 60% (see chart).

Said the report: "Life has become much safer for children." Despite depression and war, deaths from disease and accident have dropped from 270 per 100,000 (1930) to 107 per 100,000 (1946).

Doctors give part of the credit to penicillin and other new drugs; e.g., deaths from pneumonia, 1930's big killer of youngsters under four, have been cut to onefourth. But medicine has made progress all along the line. Thanks to public-health campaigns and education of parents in diet and child care, there have been far fewer deaths from contagious diseases, tuberculosis, appendicitis, diarrhea, intestinal disease, rheumatic fever.

Children's deaths from accidents have dropped, too, but not enough. Accidents, now the No. 1 killer of youngsters, kill more than twice as many 5-to-14-year-old boys as all the major diseases combined.

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