The most ratified treaty in the world turns 20 years old today.  On November 20 1989, the Convention on the Rights of Child entered into force.  Today only two countries remain outside the treaty: Somalia...and the United States.  (Somalia is without a functioning government.  The United States is without a functioning Senate.) To mark the anniversary, UNICEF  released a report today, "State of the World's Children, 2009" and UNICEF director Ann Venemen highlighted some of the Convention's accomplishments.

Ms. Veneman said one of the Convention’s most significant achievements has been its contribution to a reduction in the annual number of deaths of children under the age of five – from 12.5 million in 1990 to fewer than 9 million in 2008.

 She went on to point out that about 84 per cent of primary school-aged children are now in school, and the so-called gender gap – the numbers of boys compared to girls who are in school in the developing world – is shrinking.

UNICEF also has a nifty create-your-own chart feature on their website in which you can select countries and indicators to compare.  I thought this selection might be a geographically representative sample.  As you can see, only Equatorial Guinea saw and increase in child mortality since 1990.  Not sure what happened there, as opposed to say, Burundi, but the overall trends seem to be going in the right direction. 

It’s nice to see a mystery solved. We just saw some major panic in Indonesia about a treatment for a neglected tropical disease. The Jakarta Post reported this morning that, after a mass administration of drugs to fight lymphatic filariasis, “those treated by the drugs started to die or fall ill by the hundreds.” They ran the story under a headline that said “Did Disease-Fighting Drugs Do More Harm Than Good?”

 The news has been spread by worried Indonesian bloggers, and no one seems to believe the denials from the Indonesia Ministry of Health. According to the Post, “Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih was quick to deny the deaths were caused by the drugs, saying only that some underlying diseases were the probable cause.”

If it’s true that the treatment, a combination of the drugs DEC and albendazole, is dangerous, that’s bad stuff. Lymphatic filariasis is also known as elephantiasis and it causes serious suffering and social stigma. A billion people are at risk for it. Treating it is important work.

It turns, out, however, that DEC and albendazole actually carry some unpleasant side effects, especially for people who are infected. In particular, headaches, nausea, and fever - often quite severe.  They’re not long-lasting, or dangerous. Just very unpleasant.

All of this points to the importance of educating people about the treatments they are getting. If there had been some clear discussion of the likely side effects, people would have expected their symptoms. A mass hysteria could have been stopped before it began.

Part of the reason that progress leading toward a binding international climate change agreement has been so halting is that President Obama has said that he will not commit the United States to emission reduction goals unless congress gives him a path by which those goals can be met.  

Well, today, a new group launched that could be a big step toward helping the United States meet its international responsibilies on climate. 

At the United States Capital a coalition of lawmakers, business leaders and NGOs brought together by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Energy Future Coalition* launched an initiative to promote the retrofitting for energy efficiency of 50 million residential and commercial buildings by 2020. The idea is to spur the domestic economy by having the government at the local and federal levels provide incentives and tax breaks for energy audits and retrofitting for homes and businesses. According to the group, called Rebuilding America, the plan would create over 600,000 good jobs in manufacturing and construction; would save households an average of $832 a year by 2030; and avoid 42 million tons of carbon emissions per year, the equivalent of taking 80 million cars off the road.Senator Jeff Merkeley of Oregon described this plan as a win-win-win for the jobs it can create, the money it can save homeowners and businesses and the step toward energy independence it achieves.

It seems that we have moved beyond the days when policy makers dismissed conservation efforts as matters of "personal virtue."   I would just add that for all the talk about new sources of energy and renewables, simple efforts toward increasing energy efficiency is a relatively easy way to reduce carbon outputs in the here and now.  I'm interested to see how this plan progresses.  You can read the full strategy paper here. 

*The Energy Future Coalition is part of the UN Foundation family. 

The Center for Global Development’s excellent Global Health Policy blog noted today the huge resource deficit that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TD, and Malaria is currently facing -- a $2.6 billion funding gap over the next two years.

To cover those cuts, the Global Fund is taking ten percent off the top of all grants, calling it an “efficiency cut.” In my own experience, that will work for the first round or two, and then everyone will just start gaming the system by padding their grant requests. They are also only committing to pay 90 percent of grant funding and are assuming they’ll find a way to fill in the other 10 percent in the next two years. Finally, they’re probably going to delay grant approvals until more funding is available.

It adds up to the erosion of funding for HIV, TB, and Malaria, at a time when the money is needed more than ever. All three of those illnesses are made worse by poverty.  In a time of global financial crisis the need is heightened not lessened.