Newborn mortality declining but progress still too slow

 

Newborn deaths put millennium development goal under threat

As more older children survive, slower progress in cutting death rates among babies in the first weeks of life is putting the goal of reducing child deaths by two-thirds in jeopardy.

Sarah Boseley

Children under the age of five are increasingly likely to survive in poor countries, as efforts to reach millennium development goal 4 (reducing child deaths by two-thirds) pay off. But newborns are still at high risk – and a new study shows that the slower progress in cutting death rates among babies in the first weeks of life is putting the goal in jeopardy.

More than 8 million children die before they reach the age of five, but as more older children survive an increasing proportion of those deaths – now 41% – are among neonates (babies less than four weeks old).
Tiny babies are very vulnerable. They die because they are small and frail after premature delivery (29%), from asphyxia during birth, or from severe infections such as blood poisoning and pneumonia. Many would survive if they were delivered by a trained midwife, but these are in short supply.

"The global health worker crisis is the biggest factor in the deaths of mothers and children, and particularly the 3.3 million newborns dying needlessly each year. Training more midwives and more community health workers will allow many more lives to be saved," says Dr Joy Lawn of Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives programme, a co-author of the report that SCF has produced with the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The report, published on the open access website PLoS Medicine, is the most comprehensive estimate yet of the death toll among newborns worldwide over a 20 year period, from 1990 to 2009. The researchers find that newborn mortality dropped by 28% – but that was much slower than the drop in maternal mortality (34%) and the deaths of older children under five (37%).

Click here to read more.

Click here to read about MDG-F's work to reduce child mortality.

 

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