KARACHI, May 28: Speakers at a workshop said that many of the children under the age of five years could be saved from deaths due to preventable diseases every year through a combination of good care, nutrition and medical treatment, including routine immunisation.

About 550,000 under five children die in Pakistan from preventable causes including pneumonia, diarrhoea, malnutrition, measles and malaria. Pakistan has been able to reduce mortality rates for children by 15 per cent since 1990, but it was still among the countries with high mortality in children, noted the speakers.

The workshop for training of doctors, who are supposed to work as facilitators and trainers of practitioners at the district levels, was organised under the Integrated Management of Neonatal and Childhood Illness (IMNCI) cell at the Civil Hospital, Karachi on Monday. The IMNCI is a WHO / Unicef approved strategy started in collaboration.

The facilitators will guide the doctors in the districts handling under five children at the BHUs, RHCs and hospitals so that they could recognise preventable diseases in children at the earliest and give them the required treatment at their level or refer the patients to major hospitals, said a spokesman for the programme.

Deirdre Kiernan, the newly posted Unicef, Sindh chief, inaugurated the workshop at Unit-III, Department of Paediatrics, CHK. Dr Asif Aslam of Unicef Sindh lauded the efforts of IMNCI cell and assured further support for training of doctors and expansion of the activities.

The provincial coordinator of the IMNCI Sindh, Prof Iqbal A Memon underscored the importance of the programme and said that it was the need of the time to counteract the major killer diseases in order to check the high infant and less than five-year childhood mortality.

Dr Abdul Wahid Bhurtt, WHO chief Sindh said that the IMNCI activities would help achieve millennium development goals and improve health indicators in Pakistan.

Dr. M.N Lal, Deputy Director IMNCI said as per the plan 40 doctors would be trained as facilitators in the first phase to be completed in June. These facilitators will further continue these training in eight pilot districts of Sindh, including Karachi, Hyderabad, Matiari, Tando Allahyar, Tando Mohammad Khan, Tando Jam, Sanghar and Nawabshah, he added.

Meanwhile, the project director of the Nutrition Support Programme, Prof Dur-i-Sameen Akram has underscored the need for therapeutic feeding centres across the country to help counter 55 per cent mortality among children less than five years of age.

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony of therapeutic feeding centres at the paediatrics departments of the CHK and the Lyari General Hospital, the paediatrician identified severe malnutrition as a major cause of deaths among the children in the country.

Prof Akram said that in Pakistan approximately three million children under five years of age were affected and needed initial management in hospitals.