posts: 26750

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                "text": [
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                        "text": "Child mortality declined in all countries",
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                        "text": "The decline in global child mortality is not just due to improvements in a\u00a0few well-off, developed regions. In fact, ",
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                                "text": "every single country",
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                        "text": " achieved a reduction. This is what the chart below shows. Hover over the lines with your mouse to see the decline of child mortality in\u00a0each country.",
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                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-1990-vs-2017-slope",
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                        "text": "Yet, even after decades of unprecedented global progress there are still stark divides. The difference between the worst-off countries (e.g. Angola with a 16% child mortality) and the best-off countries (e.g. Luxembourg at 0.2%), shows what is possible and underscores that a lot of work remains to be done.",
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                        "text": "This work is already underway. The biggest recent improvements were\u00a0achieved in the countries that were worst off in the 1950s. The least healthy\u00a0countries have been catching up, and the inequality in health across the world today\u00a0is substantially lower than a few\u00a0decades ago.",
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                        "text": "With fewer children dying, we might initially expect populations to increase, leading to problems with living space and resource consumption. Thankfully, in the long term this does not appear to be the case: as countries develop and mortality falls, they also undergo a decrease in birth rates known as the ",
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                        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/#demographic-transition",
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                                "text": "demographic transition",
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                        "text": ". This trend is expected to continue to apply to those developing countries which currently have both high mortality and high birth rates. We recently made a ",
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                    {
                        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348",
                        "children": [
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                                "text": "short video",
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                    {
                        "text": " about this with our colleagues at\u00a0Kurzgesagt.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "We are making progress against a broad range of\u00a0causes of child death",
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                        "text": "What is killing our\u00a0children? Here we\u00a0compare the causes of child death in 1990\u00a0and in 2015. The data comes\u00a0from\u00a0the IHME's ",
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                    {
                        "url": "http://www.healthdata.org/gbd",
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                                "text": "Global Burden of Disease study",
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                        "text": ".",
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            {
                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-child-mortality-by-cause",
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                        "text": "This visualization shows the many causes of child deaths and the mortality rate that they are responsible for. Birth complications, pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, and malaria all still lead to the death of more than 400,000\u00a0children annually.",
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                        "text": "In many cases, the comparison with 1990\u00a0shows that we are on track to a rapid reduction. But the\u00a0breakdown by cause also highlights that preventable diseases are still responsible for an\u00a0unacceptably\u00a0large share of child deaths and we have the\u00a0duty and the possibility to reduce child mortality further.",
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                "text": [
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                        "text": "27 major plane crashes averted every day",
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                        "text": "The achievement that this blog post\u00a0highlights is that child mortality has decreased substantially. What does this mean in terms of the absolute number of child deaths that we discussed above?",
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                        "text": "The number of child deaths declined from over 12 million in 1990 to 5.8 million in 2015 (the year for which we have the latest data).\u00a0Notably, this decline by 6.3\u00a0million child deaths happened despite the absolute number of births increasing slightly over the same period.",
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                        "text": "6.3 million fewer deaths means that\u00a0compared with 1990, there are 17,258 fewer child deaths\u00a0",
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                                "text": "every single day",
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                        "text": ".",
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                        "text": "We\u00a0were also surprised to see the scale of the\u00a0reduction of child mortality when broken down like this. Over a period of 25 years, in which the number of births had slightly increased, the world was able to reduce the number of child deaths every single day by more than 17,000. Compared with 1990, this\u00a0is the equivalent of saving 27 planes from crashing on a daily basis. Were it to receive as much attention as aviation disasters do, we think this would be seen as an extremely big deal.",
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                        "text": "Every case of a family losing a child is a tragedy.\u00a0And\u00a0even after an impressive improvement in global health,\u00a0the unseen daily cruelty of child death remains immense: close to 6 million children still die every year; 16,000 children every day.",
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                        "text": "The enormous global tragedy of preventable child death, and the progress against it, are best seen over time scales too long for a standard media cycle. We should still strive to be aware of both. The number of deaths remains very high, but the historical perspective gives us hope that a future where many more children are able to live full lives is possible.",
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        ],
        "type": "article",
        "title": "Global child mortality: it is hard to overestimate both the immensity of the tragedy, and\u00a0the progress the world has made (2)",
        "authors": [
            null
        ],
        "dateline": "November 1, 2019",
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    "createdAt": "2019-11-01T11:36:26.000Z",
    "published": false,
    "updatedAt": "2020-04-30T14:00:12.000Z",
    "revisionId": null,
    "publishedAt": "2019-11-01T11:36:21.000Z",
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