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Happy Birthday and Welcome to American No. 300,000,000
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 Sometime this month, the population of the United States will reach 300 million inhabitants, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections. To the newborn who helps us cross this milestone, the Global Health Council welcomes you and wishes you a happy birthday. We hope you will be blessed with a lifetime of good health and predict that the chances are very good that you will make it to Kindergarten. Unfortunately, the chances are not so good for many of the thousands of newborns in the less-developed parts of the world who share your birthday.
 You, American No. 300,000,000, have had the extraordinary good luck of being born in the United States. You had a 99 percent chance that your mother was assisted by a skilled birth attendant. Babies born this month in low-income countries have only a 41 percent chance of their mother having any skilled help and that’s important because losing your mother is the single greatest threat to your life.
Although the chances that your mother will die due to pregnancy-related causes is only one in 12,500 here in the United States, babies born in Cameroon are almost 91 times more likely to lose their mothers, and babies born in Afghanistan are 200 times more likely to lose their mothers.
 After you make it through delivery, health professionals in the United States should be watching you closely because the first year is still very critical to getting a good start in life. Eight percent of newborns in the United States are low birthweight babies – a percentage that is much too high for a developed country like ours – but most U.S. babies survive this condition. You’ve probably already started your immunization regime, receiving your first Hepatitis B vaccination before being discharged from the hospital.
Chances are your parents and health-care provider will make sure that you receive a battery of checkups to make sure you are growing and reaching development milestones as expected. Although access to health care is not perfect in the United States, you will probably receive treatment for routine ailments you may face – like respiratory infections, ear infections and dehydration. Newborns who have the misfortune of being born to poor families in low-income countries at this time are 11 times more likely to die in their first year than you are – usually from similar, common ailments.
 For children in low-income countries, the odds are still not great after the first year. Children between ages 1 and 4 are 15 times more likely to die of preventable and treatable diseases than you are. While your parents enjoy watching you learn to walk and talk, these families still can’t take their children’s survival for granted. Around the world, approximately 30,000 children under age 5 die each day and more than half of them perish from causes that we could prevent or treat successfully.
The injustice of these odds for the children who share your birthday is unconscionable. The United States has been a leader in the past in providing the aid and technical assistance that greatly improved child survival in the developing world and helped bring about a tremendous decrease in mortality rates for children under 5 worldwide. But those great advances have stopped because, for the last several years, core program funding for child and maternal health programs has stagnated. The current level doesn't allow the existing interventions to reach all of the children in need, and U.S. leaders have not been willing to invest the money needed to help other countries save millions of children’s lives each year.
 While no one can guarantee that you, American No. 300,000,000, will have perfect health or full access to all the health care you need, the overall prognosis is good because you will grow up in a country that continues to invest in providing for your health. We predict that investment in children’s health continues here, and we hope that the U.S. government will see fit, once again, to join other countries and donors and make the investments necessary for children’s health throughout the world. With those investments in place, the odds will be in every child’s favor.
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