For decades, the focus of international public health concern has been on reducing child mortality, and rightly so. As recently as the mid-1980s, some 15 million children under the age of five years died each year, representing 30% of all deaths worldwide and up to half of all deaths in many countries (1). The vast majority of these deaths were preventable with current technology, as evidenced ...

Bangladesh is currently one of the very few countries in the world, which is on target for achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 relating to child mortality. There have been very rapid reductions in mortality, especially in recent years and among children aged over one month. However, this rate of reduction may be difficult to sustain and may impede the achievement of MDG 4. Neonata...

BACKGROUND Across the developing world, countries are increasingly adopting the integrated community case management of childhood illnesses (iCCM) strategy in efforts to reduce child mortality. This intervention's effectiveness is dependent on community adoption and changes in care-seeking practices. We assessed the implementation process of a theory-driven community dialogue (CD) intervention ...

Parental divorce is known to be associated with poor child health in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the great diversity in social and cultural practices, including marital ones, across the subcontinent likely yields substantial variation in the prevalence of divorce, which in turn could moderate its consequences for children. In this paper, we use Demographic and Health Survey data from 31 Africa...

BACKGROUND Between 1999 and 2007, the Ministry of Health and Population in Egypt scaled up the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy in 84% of public health facilities. OBJECTIVES This retrospective analysis, using routinely available data from vital registration, aimed to assess the impact of IMCI implementation between 2000 and 2006 on child mortality. It also presents ...

E nveloped in poverty and burdened by its onerous topography, Nepal is hardly an obvious birthplace for a public health success story. And yet, the marriage of scientific and operational innovations provided the foundation for a national program that saves hundreds of thousands of children’s lives. In the early 1980s, a series of studies demonstrated that vitamin A supplementation could reduce ...

Currently, more than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. The time burden of water fetching has been suggested to influence the volume of water collected by households as well as time spent on income generating activities and child care. However, little is known about the potential health benefits of reducing water fetching d...

In India, child mortality rates for girls are much higher than those for boys, indicating discrimination against girls in the intra-household allocation of resources. In addition, overall child mortality rates remain high in many parts of the country. This paper attempts to understand important predictors of both child and excessive female child mortality in India, with a focus on variables rel...