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NEW THIS MONDAY: CHILD MORTALITY ESTIMATION: ACCELERATED PROGRESS IN REDUCING GLOBAL CHILD MORTALITY, 1990-2010

Sunday, 30th of June 2013

• CHILD MORTALITY ESTIMATION: ACCELERATED PROGRESS IN REDUCING GLOBAL CHILD MORTALITY, 1990-2010

Abstract below; full text is at http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001303;jsessionid=F2DDF3E25ECC5F9C8CCB70221CC99417

Monitoring development indicators has become a central interest of international agencies and countries for tracking progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. In this review, which also provides an introduction to a collection of articles, we describe the methodology used by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation to track country-specific changes in the key indicator for Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4), the decline of the under-five mortality rate (the probability of dying between birth and age five, also denoted in the literature as U5MR and 5q0). We review how relevant data from civil registration, sample registration, population censuses, and household surveys are compiled and assessed for United Nations member states, and how time series regression models are fitted to all points of acceptable quality to establish the trends in U5MR from which infant and neonatal mortality rates are generally derived. The application of this methodology indicates that, between 1990 and 2010, the global U5MR fell from 88 to 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, and the annual number of under-five deaths fell from 12.0 to 7.6 million. Although the annual rate of reduction in the U5MR accelerated from 1.9% for the period 1990–2000 to 2.5% for the period 2000–2010, it remains well below the 4.4% annual rate of reduction required to achieve the MDG 4 goal of a two-thirds reduction in U5MR from its 1990 value by 2015. Thus, despite progress in reducing child mortality worldwide, and an encouraging increase in the pace of decline over the last two decades, MDG 4 will not be met without greatly increasing efforts to reduce child deaths.

Citation: Hill K, You D, Inoue M, Oestergaard MZ, Technical Advisory Group of the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2012) Child Mortality Estimation: Accelerated Progress in Reducing Global Child Mortality, 1990–2010. PLoS Med 9(8): e1001303. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001303

Academic Editor: Peter Byass, Umeå Centre for Global Health Research, Umeå University, Sweden

Published: August 28, 2012

Copyright: © Hill et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The work of You, Inoue, and Oestergaard was supported by Unicef and WHO. Hills work was partially supported by Unicef. No funding body had any role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UN IGME agencies and the funding sources.

Abbreviations: ARR, annual rate of reduction; CME, child mortality estimation; DHS, Demographic and Health Surveys; FBH, full birth history; IMR, infant mortality rate; MDG, Millennium Development Goal; MDG 4, Millennium Development Goal 4; NMR, neonatal mortality rate; TAG, Technical Advisory Group of the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation; U5MR, under-five mortality rate; UN IGME, United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation; UNAIDS, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS; UNICEF, United Nations Childrens Fund; WHO, World Health Organization

¶ A listing of the other members of the Technical Advisory Group of the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality can be found in the Acknowledgments.

Provenance: Submitted as part of a sponsored Collection; externally reviewed.