MANILA: The safest places for children in Asia are also the most dangerous.

More than 1,000 children in the region die every day before reaching their fifth birthday nearly always due to illnesses related to the places where they live, learn and play, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns.

The paradox is that “these children are most in danger in the places they should be the safest — at home, at schools and in their local community,” laments Shigeru Omi, the regional director of WHO’s Western Pacific office in Manila.

“And the big number of children dying everyday in East Asia and the Pacific illustrates how serious the problem is,” Omi said in an interview ahead of World Health Day on Monday (today), which this year is dedicated to “Healthy Environments for Children.”

The key environment-linked conditions that cause deaths among children under five years old in the region are diarrhoea, malnutrition, acute respiratory illnesses, malaria and measles.

Omi lists six reasons for this: poverty, uncontrolled urbanization, rapidly-changing lifestyle, low level of education among parents and child caretakers, negative influence of the mass media and insufficient government commitments.

“Every child has the right to be raised in a healthy environment,” he said. “But for many children, the reality is that poverty deprives them of that right.”

Under poverty-stricken condition, it is the children who suffer the most as their fragile immune, digestive and central nervous systems are susceptible to many kinds of health problems, he said.

For example, the contaminated water children drink or in which their food is cooked threatens their lives with diarrhoea and other intestinal problems.

According to the WHO, some 100 million children in the Western Pacific region covering 37 countries in East Asia and the Pacific do not have access to safe water.

Other concerns are air pollution caused by open fires used for cooking and heating inside congested homes as well as cigarette smoking by parents.—AFP