Half of all under-5 deaths in '08 in India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, China
WEDNESDAY, May 12 (HealthDay News) -- In 2008, there were an estimated 8.795 million deaths in children younger than 5 worldwide; infectious diseases caused more than two-thirds of these deaths, and almost half of them occurred in just five countries, according to an analysis published online May 12 in The Lancet.
Robert E. Black, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues used multi-cause proportionate mortality models to estimate the number of deaths in neonates aged 0 to 27 days and children aged 1 to 59 months. They also calculated the numbers of cause-specific deaths for countries, regions, and the world.
The researchers write that an estimated 8.795 million deaths occurred in children younger than 5 years worldwide in 2008. Overall, 68 percent of these deaths were due to infectious diseases, with the most common being pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Neonates comprised 41 percent of the worldwide deaths, and these deaths were mostly due to complications of preterm birth, birth asphyxia, sepsis and pneumonia. Forty-nine percent of all under-5 deaths occurred in just five countries: India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and China, while just 1 percent of the deaths occurred in high-income countries.
"The concentration of all-cause child deaths and deaths due to some specific causes, such as diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and AIDS, in a small set of countries is striking. This result is partly related to the large populations of children younger than 5 years in these countries, but also some diseases are concentrated because of epidemiological and social conditions," the authors write. "However, nearly all countries still face the challenge to reduce child deaths from preventable conditions, irrespective of their number or cause. These national estimates of the causes of child death in 2008 should help to identify priority interventions for child survival, and how to allocate national and international resources."
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