The following post is by Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow for the Center for Global Development. It originally appears on the CGD blog. If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year. New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years.
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah “says development assistance to Ethiopia’s health sector has helped save thousands of children’s lives in the past year,” VOA News reports, noting, “The progress came even as the Horn of Africa was hit by the worst drought in more than half a century.” “Twenty years ago, every fifth child died by the age of five. Today, 10 out of 11 make it past their fifth birthday,” the news service writes, noting, “Shah says the results are a credit to Ethiopia’s effective use of aid dollars.”
Follow this link: Inexpensive Test, Treatment For Syphilis Could Save Nearly 1M Infants…
In global public health, we talk about a class of diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality, but for which treatments are either unavailable, ineffective, or toxic, known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). One of the main problems with NTDs is that they predominantly occur in populations who lack the financial means of purchasing new [...]
See the article here: Visualizing Global Child Mortality Trends
See the original post: Urbanization Leaves Millions Of Children Without Access To Vital Services,…
Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of talks about child malnutrition. In large part, this is because we have been working on a project to deliver Nutributter, a lipid based nutrient supplement, to children less than two years of age across a good-sized geographic chunk of Guatemala. Simultaneously, we’ve been using Plumpy’doz, another lipid based [...]
An Indian girl between the ages of one and five years old is 75 percent more likely to die than an Indian boy, giving the country the worst gender differential in child mortality in the world, according to new data released by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the Times of India reports.
Anthony Lake, the executive director of UNICEF, has just published a great opinion piece about stunting, or chronic child malnutrition. You can read the full piece here. In short, he reminds us that stunting is a condition which affects 180 million children around the world and which, nevertheless, most of us have “never heard of”. [...]
Lipid based nutrient supplements (LNS) are perhaps one of the most exciting, and potentially transformative emerging technologies for the treatment of chronic malnutrition. LNS preparations are called ‘lipid-based’ because, unlike older nutritional formulations, they derive a much larger percentage of their calories from fats (typically from peanuts, milk, and vegetable oils). They also generally contain [...]
Today India is celebrating a milestone in the fight against polio: in the last year, no new cases were reported. This means a lot to those involved in the prevention and immunization programmes. The last case was detected on January 13, 2011 in a 2-year-old girl in India’s West Bengal state. This means that India [...]
Researchers in this PLoS Medicine article examine the efforts necessary to reach the WHO goal of reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission (MTCT) risk to less than five percent in Zimbabwe. They conclude, “Implementation of the WHO [prevention of MTCT (PMTCT)] guidelines must be accompanied by efforts to improve access to PMTCT services, retain women in care, and support medication adherence throughout pregnancy and breastfeeding, to approach the ‘virtual elimination’ of pediatric HIV in Zimbabwe,” according to the study (Ciaranello et al., 1/10).
The following posts is by Martha Kempner and originally appears on the RH Reality Check Blog . The opinions stated are that of the author and are not necessarily those of PSI.
Tuberculosis (TB) in children is often a neglected issue, in terms of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring prevalence. The best numbers we have are from the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Mandy Slutsker from the advocacy group RESULTS, which reported in 2009 that every year more than 1 million children get infected and about ( Read more… )
