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October 22, 2007Nutritional and Environmental Interventions Can Help Decrease Child Deaths Worldwide |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Interventions that improve nutrition and environmental conditions can also provide substantial gains toward the goal of reducing child mortality, especially when the interventions prioritize the poor, according to a study in the October 24/31 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on poverty and human development. This initiative is coordinated by the Council of Science Editors, and presentations regarding some of the studies in this Global Theme Issue will be webcast live from the National Institutes of Health (http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=6239), including this study, presented by co-author Majid Ezzati, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established in 2000 in a declaration adopted unanimously by U.N. member countries to focus resources and efforts toward critical global poverty, health, and sustainability problems. The MDGs set numerical targets to be achieved by 2015 and use socioeconomic, environmental, nutritional, and health indicators to monitor progress toward these targets, according to background information in the article. They analyzed data on economic status, child underweight, water and sanitation, and household fuels from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 42 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. "Implementing interventions that improve child nutrition and provide clean water and sanitation and clean household fuels to all children younger than five years would result in an estimated annual reduction in child deaths of 49,700 (14 percent) in Latin America and the Caribbean, 0.80 million (24 percent) in South Asia, and 1.47 million (31 percent) in sub-Saharan Africa," the authors report. More information about the Council of Science Editors' Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development is available at http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/globalthemeissue.cfm.
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