23 lakh kids aged below 5 died in one year in India

Kounteya Sinha, TNN, Nov 13, 2010, 02.49am IST
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Tags: NEW DELHI: Around 23 lakh children, aged 1-59 months, died in India in 2005 alone. Of these, more than 60% were from five causes — pneumonia, prematurity and low birthweight, diarrhoeal diseases, neonatal infections and birth asphyxia and birth trauma. Two causes accounted for 50% (6.7 lakh) of all deaths at 1-59 months —pneumonia 3.7 lakhs and diarrhoeal diseases 3 lakhs. This has been revealed in a study by the Registrar General of India published in British medical journal " The Lancet" on Saturday morning.

According to its authors, each of the major causes of neonatal deaths can be prevented or treated with known, highly effective and widely practicable interventions, raising concerns that the neonatal death rate in India is not falling fast enough.

The study says that in children aged 1-59 months, girls in central India had a five times higher mortality rate (per 1000 livebirths) from pneumonia than did boys in south India and four times higher mortality rate from diarrhoeal diseases than did boys in west India.

The study makes another vital observation — social preference for boys probably affects survival for girls. States with higher mortality rates in girls than in boys aged 1-59 months were also those with lower female-to-male sex ratio for second births after a boy (a measure of selective abortion of girls).

This finding also implies that less frequent use of health services by girls than by boys occurs in the same states in which selective abortion of female fetuses is common. Professor Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto and one of the study's lead authors, says the yearly child mortality rates in India have fallen between 1.77% and 2.73% in the past two decades.

Despite this decrease, the United Nations estimates that about 23.5 lakh children died in India in 2005 — 20% of all deaths in children younger than 5 years worldwide, more than in any other country. Prof Jha said, "Large differences in overall child survival between India's diverse regions have been previously documented. However, no direct measurement of the major causes of death in neonates (less than one month) and at ages 1-59 months has been done and how these causes of death vary across India's regions is unknown."


Read more: 23 lakh kids aged below 5 died in one year in India - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/23-lakh-kids-aged-below-5-died-in-one-year-in-India/articleshow/6916912.cms#ixzz15AkiTYxE