Child Death Rates Declining

by Guest 26th May 2010, 12:42 pm

Death rates in children under 5 are dropping in many countries at a surprisingly fast pace, according to a new report based on data from 187 countries from 1970 to 2010.

Worldwide, 7.7 million children are expected to die this year — still an enormous number, but a vast improvement over the 1990 figure of 11.9 million.

On average, death rates have dropped by about 2 percent a year from 1990 to 2010, and in many regions, even some of the poorest in Africa, the declines have started to accelerate, according to the report, which is being published online Sunday by The Lancet, a medical journal. Some parts of Latin America, north Africa and the Middle East have had declines as steep as 6 percent a year.

[b]Vaccines, AIDS medicines, vitamin A supplements, better treatment of diarrhea and pneumonia, insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria and more education for women are among the factors that have helped lower death rates.

The improvements in Africa were especially encouraging. The very slow progress in Africa has led some people in global health to argue there should be more emphasis on tackling child mortality outside of Africa, especially India.

A third of all deaths in children occur in south Asia, and half in sub-Saharan Africa. Newborns account for 41 percent of those who die. The lowest death rates, per 1,000 births, are in Singapore (2.5) and Iceland (2.6); the highest are in Equatorial Guinea (180.1) and Chad (168.7). In rich countries, some of the worst rates are in the United States (6.7) and Britain (5.3).

Dr. Mickey Chopra, the chief of health for Unicef, said countries with governments that had “fully supported child survival and primary care” had improved quickly, and he cited Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Rwanda. In addition, he said Botswana had scaled up treatment for H.I.V. and for preventing mother-to-child transmission, and was seeing child mortality rates decline as a result. Zambia also had significant declines, he said, because 75 percent of families had received bed nets to prevent malaria.

But he said the improvements could easily be reversed, because the underlying poverty in many countries had not changed.

Dr. Flavia Bustreo, director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, a group administered by the World Health Organization, said that an important factor in the improvements was “reduced fertility” — women having fewer children, and leaving more than two years between pregnancies, which both increase their children’s odds for survival.

(Article retrieved from the New York Times, Published 23 May 2010)