May
11, 2010 (HealthDay News)
- Infectious diseases
such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria
and blood poisoning account for more than two-thirds of the 8.8 million annual
deaths in kids under 5 years of age worldwide, a new report shows.
Other leading causes of
death for children include birth complications, lack of oxygen during
birth and congenital defects.
The authors of the report found that infectious diseases caused 5.97 million
deaths among kids under age 5 in 2008. Pneumonia (18 percent), diarrhea (15
percent) and malaria (8 percent) accounted for the highest numbers. About 40
percent of the deaths were in infants aged no more than 27 days.
Almost half of these deaths occurred in just five countries --
China, Nigeria,
India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan.
Africa (4.2 million) and Southeast Asia (2.39 million) accounted for the
highest numbers of deaths.
Countries with high average
incomes, for example, the United States, were more likely to have
a higher rate of deaths caused by injuries.
There is some good news: While there are more kids under the age of 5 in the
world, the number of deaths among them has fallen from 10.6 million per year
from 2000-2003 to 8.8 million in 2008, the authors noted.
The report, written by Robert E. Black of the department of international
health at Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and colleagues on
behalf of the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, was
released online May 11 in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of The Lancet.
The authors wrote: "We challenge countries and programs to advance the
quality and consistency of data on causes of death, and, most importantly to use
such data in the design of programs to achieve maximum progress in the crucial
few years before [The Millennium
Development Goal target of] 2015."