India has more than halved the annual deaths among children under five years, from 2.5 million in 2000 to 1.2 million in 2015, but wide disparities remain between states, a Lancet study has found.
Assam’s under-5 death rate is close to eight times that in Goa, which reported 9.7 such deaths per 1,000 live births compared to Assam’s 73.1, found researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health after analysing government health survey data on the causes of under-5 deaths from 2000-2015.
India has the world’s biggest birth cohort, with 26 million babies born every year, and the largest number of child deaths.
The top causes of under-5 deaths are pre-term birth complications, preventable infectious diseases such as pneumonia and diarrhoea, followed by injuries, meningitis, measles and malaria, according to the study published in The Lancet Global Health.
Read more of this in a report by Sanchita Sharma published in Hindustan Times...
