Society should create a healthier, cleaner and safer environment for children, officials said yesterday.

The health of Chinese children differs enormously between cities and villages and between rich and poor areas, despite improvements overall, Vice-Minister of Health Wang Longde said yesterday.

Unsafe food and drinking water, environmental pollution, passive smoking, accidents and HIV/AIDS are the major health hazards for today's children in China, Wang said at a meeting to commemorate yesterday's World Health Day, with the theme of "Healthy Environments for Children."

China's mortality rate for infants and for children under five years of age has fallen from 50.2 and 61 per thousand respectively in 1990 to 32.2 and 39.7 per thousand in 2000.

More than 90 percent of the target population have been immunized against tuberculosis, measles, poliomyelitis and pertussis.

Since 2001, the central government has included the hepatitis B vaccine in the State's immunization schedule and aims to vaccinate all newborns against the disease, which already infects nearly 120 million Chinese people.

Wang urged adults to help prevent unnecessary deaths and minimize risk of injury by creating a cleaner and safer environment for some 300 million children across China.

Accidents such as suffocation, drowning, car crashes, falls and poisoning cause about half of China's child deaths, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Lack of safety awareness among children, their parents and other guardians is the leading cause of accidents, said Duan Leilei, a member of the research team.

"The biggest threats to children's health lurk in the very places that should be the safest - at home, in school and the community - the places where they live, learn and play," said Henk Bekedam, World Health Organization (WHO) representative in China.

More than 5 million children around the world die every year from diseases linked to their local environments.

Poverty is also strongly linked to ill-health, Bekedam noted at the meeting.

In China, rural residents, who account for more than 70 percent of the total population, only consume about 30 percent of the country's medical resources, official statistics show.

This means there are many rural families without assets who do not even try to seek treatment when sick.

Wang said health care facilities in urban communities and rural villages and towns should be improved to provide children with emergency services.

China should work hard to give more rural people access to clean drinking water and sanitary toilets, and the rate of safe waste disposal should be raised in rural areas, he said.

It is estimated that most Chinese children are exposed to smoke, given that two-thirds of men in China smoke, according to a Beijing-based research center.

It warns of tobacco's health effects on children, such as lung cancer, respiratory illnesses, asthma and degradation of lung function.

Although the rate of mother-to-infant transmission of HIV, the AIDS virus, remains low in China at present, health officials said that it was crucial to prevent any increase since more than 1 million Chinese have been infected.

(China Daily April 8, 2003)