IT'S sad enough whenever someone dies. But when someone dies suddenly through suicide, homicide, violence, disaster or accident, their death becomes tragic. It becomes even more heart-rending when it is a child who is the victim, whether that child is newborn, school-age or a young adult. The death of a child brings more profound distress and intense grief than that of any other loss to a family, because the prospect of a child's death is unthinkable. No parent ever expects to bury their children. When they are grieving over the untimely death of their children and in need of emotional support to deal with the trauma -- and the guilt -- nobody should stand around and talk about "if only something" had been done differently, or not done. At the risk of appearing to be callously indifferent to the suffering of the families of the baby killed in the car crash on Saturday and the girls buried in the mudslide on Sunday, this is, nevertheless, what we should feel compelled to ask.

This is not a question of pointing a finger at the grieving families but of shedding some light on the terrible tragedies and fashioning the right responses. Barely half a century ago, the old died before they reached middle age and many newborns and their mothers died at childbirth. But preventive policies and programmes have raised life expectancy and reduced infant and maternal mortality rates. This demonstrates that while mortality is a human condition, it is still possible to manage the life-threatening conditions that worsen the odds on people living to a ripe old age.

This is why we should not be too quick to write off the road fatality as a freak occurrence, or the landslide as some sort of natural disaster. The force in a crash is too great to hold a child safely and the reaction time needed makes it virtually impossible to prevent a child from being ejected. In the case of the landslide, it may be too early to determine what caused it. Nevertheless, while heavy rains may have triggered it, the family could also be paying the consequences for poorly planned development on hill slopes. In any event, the odds are that both these tragedies could have been avoided or mitigated. Nothing about preventing death and injury through safety belts, child seats and crash helmets, or human-induced causes of mudslides, should seem theoretical any longer. When lives are at risk, there is a need for appropriate policies and regulations, action and oversight.