Tackling Inequality Could Save Millions of Children

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An unprecedented study mapping child deaths over almost two decades finds that nearly half of the 5.4 million under-5 deaths in 2017 can be attributed to differences in child death rates within and across countries.

The study is the first of its kind, mapping child deaths in 99 low- and middle-income countries at the level of individual districts. Published today in the journal Nature, the findings include precision maps illuminating health disparities within countries and regions often obscured by national-level analyses. An interactive visualization accompanying the research compares child death rates from year to year.

The research, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, looks at countries where more than 90% of child deaths occurred in 2017. Mortality rates varied as much as 10-fold between districts within a country. Across all countries studied, the likelihood of a child dying before age 5 varied more than 40-fold at the district level.

"It is as reprehensible as it is tragic that, on average, nearly 15,000 children under age 5 die every day," said Dr. Simon I. Hay, the senior author on the study and Director of the Local Burden of Disease (LBD) group at IHME. "Why are some areas doing so well, while others struggle? In order to make progress, we need to enable precise targeting of interventions, such as vaccines. Our findings provide a platform for nations' health ministers, clinicians, and others to make focused improvements in health systems."

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