The rights of children to health care.

It is remarkable that malnutrition is still implicated in more than half the deaths of children worldwide. Malnutrition renders children chronically prone to illness and impairs intellectual development. It is within the power of governments to change this grievous legacy-our world can feed our world's children. Yet despite the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 24.2C, that governments have a responsibility to combat disease and malnutrition through the process of adequate nutritious food, malnutrition, in the view of UNICEF, remains the world's most silent emergency.' Malnutrition is caused by poverty and perpetuates poverty. Child malnutrition is not confined to developing countries. In the industrialised countries with widening income disparities the nutritional status of children is threatened. Even when relatively mild, malnutrition is associated with the child's increased risk of dying. In the face of such overwhelming problems worldwide and the lack of political will to solve them, what can the individual physician do to reinforce the need to promote the health of children? The Council of the World Medical Association at its meeting in Montevideo this year prepared a Declaration on the Rights of the Child to Health Care.2 It emphasises the general principles which underpin the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes the need to combat disease and malnutrition. Every child has an inherent right to life as well as the right of access to the appropriate facilities for health promotion, the prevention and treatment of illness and the rehabilitation of health. Physicians and other health care providers have a responsibility to acknowledge and promote these rights, and to urge the provision of the material and human resources to uphold and fulfil them. The initiative for the declaration came from the Chilean Medical Association. Children's physicians in Chile are very concerned about the plight of children in hospitals, who are in a very similar situation as pertained in the UK in the fifties. Proposals were put forward to the World Medical Association to support the Chilean physicians in their quest to put pressure on the health authorities for change. Further discussions in the World Medical Association resulted in a working group being set up, with representatives from the Chilean, Israeli, Canadian and British medical associations. The group produced a wider statement on the rights of the child to health care. The document has been sent for consultation to all the sixty …