Sixty percent of the world’s 5.9 million children who died before
their fifth birthday last year were in 10 countries in Asia and Africa,
said a study published on Friday, prompting calls for action to reduce
the mortality.
The study published in The Lancet medical journal said the latest
data highlights the inequality in children’s death among the 194
countries it studied, even though the number of under-five deaths has
fallen by 4 million compared to 2010.
Of the 5.9 million deaths last year, 3.6 million happened in 10 Asian
and African countries – India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, China, Angola, Indonesia, Bangladesh and
Tanzania.
The two leading causes were complications due to premature birth and
pneumonia, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine and the World Health Organization.
The researchers said child survival has improved substantially,
although countries failed to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goal
to cut the rate of under-five deaths by two-thirds between 1990 and
2015.
The rate fell by 53 percent over the period.
The slow progress to reduce newborn deaths – in the first 28 days of
life – hampered the MDG target, the researchers said. Of the 5.9 million
under-five deaths in 2015, 2.7 million were newborns.
“The problem is that this progress is uneven across all countries,
meaning a high child death rate persists in many countries,” said the
study’s lead author Li Liu, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health in the U.S.
“Substantial progress is needed for countries in sub-Saharan Africa
and Southern Asia to achieve the child survival target of the
Sustainable Development Goals,” she added.
Under the Sustainable Development Goals, which replaced the MDGs last
year, all countries aim to reduce under-five mortality to no more than
25 deaths per 1,000 births by 2030.
The researchers recommended breastfeeding, vaccines for pneumonia,
malaria and diarrhea, as well as improving water and sanitation to help
with children’s survival.
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