Wisdom from an Alien

“This is fascinating, isn’t it? The human infant mortality rate is 29 thousand 158 deaths per day. Every three seconds a child dies. The human response is to accept and adapt…” The 456

That quote was spoken by a malevolent alien invader in the third season of Torchwood. For those of you who don’t know, Torchwood is a British Scifi show that is a spin off of the very-popular-in-the-UK Doctor Who. The alien in question was called a 456 and it was on Earth to take 10% of the child population so it could suck chemicals out of their prepubescent bodies to be used as drugs.

Scifi fun aside, the alien made a good point. When it was told that the sacrifice of the children was not really something the humans would do without a fight, It pointed out that tens of thousands of children are dying on a regular basis (The number is actually closer to a child every 4 seconds, yet that is still horrible). And what are we as a planet doing about it? Not too much. While mortality rates are on the decline due in part by the work of groups such as UNICEF, as a global population it is not something that most of us think about on a regular basis. 

One of the UN Millennium Development Goals is actually to reduce by 2/3s the child mortality from 1990 rates by 2015. Unfortunately, as can be seen in the graph below, we are not quite there yet.

Anyway, next time you have the opportunity to learn more about the MDGs, or make a contribution to a group that is working on achieving them, just think that in the time it is taking you to make a decision on whether to contribute or keep reading, several children under the age of 5 have probably already died, just like that.

Right now, the alien from the TV show is right. Children are dying, and we just accept it and move on. Lets not sit idly by as the on going atrocity continues.