Study Provides New Estimates of Causes of Child Mortality Worldwide

Another study that evidences the seriousness of sepsis and pneumonia and the role that they play in deaths worldwide. As you know, many people, adults and kids alike, have sepsis and pneumonia as their precipitating causes to ARDS.


http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2005/04apr05/04child.html

Seventy-three percent of the 10.6 million child deaths worldwide each year are the result of six causes: pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, neonatal sepsis, pre-term delivery and asphyxia at birth. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the World Health Organization have developed the most accurate estimates to date of the causes of death of children under age 5. The estimates, which are published in the March 26 edition of The Lancet, will help guide public health policies and programs that address child mortality worldwide.

According to the study, four communicable disease categories account for 54 percent of all child deaths globally. Pneumonia accounts for 19 percent of all child deaths; diarrhea, 17 percent; malaria, 8 percent; and neonatal sepsis, 10 percent. Undernutrition is an underlying cause in more than half of all deaths before age 5. More than 37 percent of all child deaths occur during the first 28 days of life, the neonatal period. The researchers noted that child mortality is greatest in Africa. The study shows that 42 percent of child deaths under age 5 occur in Africa, which is also where 94 percent of all child deaths attributed to malaria occur.