This article provides evidence that women's employment, in spite of its other benefits, probably has one crucial adverse consequence: a higher level of child mortality than is found among women who do not work. We examine various intermediate mechanisms for this relationship and conclude that a shortage of time is one of the major reasons for this negative relation between maternal employment ...

BACKGROUND Under-five mortality remains high in Burkina Faso with significant reductions required to meet Millennium Development Goal 4. The Acceleration for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health is being implemented to reduce child mortality in the North and Center North regions of Burkina Faso. METHODS The Lives Saved Tool was used to determine the percent reduction in child mortality that ca...

Appropriate consideration of contextual factors is essential for ensuring internal and external validity of randomized and non-randomized evaluations. Contextual factors may confound the association between delivery of the intervention and its potential health impact. They may also modify the effect of the intervention or programme, thus affecting the generalizability of results. This is partic...

Evolutionary models of human reproduction argue that variation in fertility can be understood as the local optimization of a life-history trade-off between offspring quantity and 'quality'. Child survival is a fundamental dimension of quality in these models as early-life mortality represents a crucial selective bottleneck in human evolution. This perspective is well-rehearsed, but current lite...

Background. Efforts to reduce child mortality especially in Africa must as a necessity aim to decrease mortality due to pneumonia. To achieve this, preventive strategies such as expanding vaccination coverage are key. However once a child develops pneumonia prompt treatment which is essential to survival is dependent on mothers and caregiver recognition of the symptoms and danger signs of pneum...

BACKGROUND The literature implies a 'diminished entelechy' hypothesis in which birth cohorts subjected to relatively many or relatively virulent environmental insults early in life do not realize their otherwise expected lifespan. No direct test of this hypothesis appears in literature. METHODS We test the hypothesis directly by measuring the association between mortality in the first 5 years...

In Brazil, infant and child mortality reveal a downward trend. Few studies have investigated the temporal trends in the inequalities of these deaths, at individual level, according to socio-economic status. The scope of this article was to investigate the temporal trends of the magnitude of inequalities in infant and child mortality, between groups defined by maternal education and household in...

BACKGROUND The health Millennium Development Goals (4, 5, 6) impose the same ambitious 2015 targets on every country. Few low-income countries are on track to reach them. Some authors have proposed country-specific targets as a more informative method by which countries can measure their progress against their potential. METHODS This paper demonstrates a supplementary approach to assess indiv...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES The level of infant and child mortality is high among Scheduled Tribes particularly those living in rural areas. This study examines levels, trends and socio-demographic factors associated with infant and child mortality among Scheduled Tribes in rural areas. METHODS Data from the three rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) of India from 1992 to 2006 were ...