Contributed by Lisa Olen| 26 March, 2005 03:37 GMT
'Counting the world's children is not all that is involved in making the world's children count. It is important to look at the single most important determinant of childhood death -- which has to be poverty.'
More than 70% of the 10.6 million child deaths that occur worldwide each year are attributable to six causes: pneumonia (19%), diarrhea (18%), malaria (8%), neonatal sepsis or pneumonia (10%), preterm delivery (10%), and asphyxia at birth (8%), according to an article published in The Lancet that says these are the most accurate estimates to date.
Robert Black of the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues, including members of an independent group on child health epidemiology and representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO), analyzed available data from publications and ongoing studies in 2000 to 2003 to obtain new estimates for mortality by cause in children younger than 5 years of age.
They found that four communicable disease categories account for more than half (54%) of all child deaths. Infection of the blood or pneumonia in newborn babies, together with pneumonia in older children, cause 29% of all deaths.
Undernutrition is an underlying cause of 53% of all deaths in children aged younger than 5 years.
Interventions Are Available, Affordable
The investigators also calculated the total numbers and proportional distributions of deaths in children younger than 5 years by cause for the six WHO-defined regions. Forty-two percent of child deaths occur in the WHO Africa region, and an additional 29% occur in the southeast Asia region.
The causes of child deaths can be addressed through existing, available, and affordable interventions, the authors state. Reducing deaths in the neonatal period will confront health systems with new challenges -- especially in low-income countries, they add.
"Achievement of the millennium development goals of reducing child mortality by two-thirds from the 1990 rate will depend on renewed efforts to prevent and control pneumonia, diarrhea and undernutrition in all WHO regions, and malaria in the Africa region," comments Professor Black.
"In all regions, deaths in the neonatal period, primarily due to preterm delivery, sepsis or pneumonia, and birth asphyxia should also be addressed. The new estimates of the causes of child deaths should be used to guide public-health policies and programs," Professor Black urges.
Making the World's Children Count
"Counting the world's children is not all that is involved in making the world's children count," says Peter Byass of Ume |
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