Nordic countries dominate the top while countries in sub-Saharan Africa dominate the bottom levels of the best and worst places to be a mother and a child.

The Mother's Index of US-based global humanitarian organization Save the Children highlighted in the organization's State of the World's Mothers 2008 report compares the well-being of mothers and children in 146 countries

At least 10 million children under age five die annually from treatable ailments, mostly in developing countries, because they lack basic health care needs, a U.S.-based non-profit organization said Wednesday.

According to Save the Children, poor children face the risk of dying at a younger age compared to children in wealthier countries

The United Nations and World Bank launched a new campaign Friday to supply insecticide-treated bed nets for Africa.

The "Cover The Bed Net Gap" campaign will rally donor countries, multilateral institutions, the private sector, and the general public to achieve its goal of universal bed net coverage by 2010

Although malaria is a curable and preventable disease it still kills one million people a year, and infects 350 million. It remains the single largest killer of children in Africa with about 3,000 children dying of the disease there every day.

In The Republic of Congo, one widowed mother who earns $240 a month as a civil servant says she often spends up to $170 a month on medicine to treat her six children for malaria during the year

Polio cases in 2008 have nearly doubled in Nigeria as officials struggle to fight an outbreak set off by the polio vaccine itself three years ago. The West African nation is fighting off various natural strains of the virus and outbreaks linked to the vaccine.

However, Nigeria has a very low immunization rate to fight the crippling disease because of its weak health system. Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease that is highly contagious and spreads easily from human-to-human contact. In endemic areas, wild polioviruses can infect virtually the entire human population