Unequal Chances of Survival for Children of the World Due to Malnutrition

In their recently published Progress Report 2015 “Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed“, UNICEF show the current data on child mortality: every year 5.9 million children under the age of five years, equalling some 16,000 children a day, 700 children an hour, eleven children a minute or one child every five and a half seconds. 45 percent of new-born children do not even reach their first birthday; approximately one million babies die on the very first day of their life.

Among the causes of almost one half of these deaths count diseases that could be avoided to a large extent using simple preventive measures such as vaccination and hygiene as well as medications. Such diseases include pneumonia, diarrhoea, meningitis, malaria, tetanus, measles, septicaemia and also AIDS. A graphic shows an overview of the causes of death:

UNICEF states that complementary to the immediate causes of death underlying aspects should also be taken into account in order to reduce child mortality faster and more sustainably. Thus, malnutrition is deemed to be the decisive reason behind almost half of all deaths. Malnutrition is directly linked to poverty, lack of education and existentially insecure living conditions and is therefore also a social indicator and ultimately the expression of a child’s unequal chances to survive: the report shows that according to the statistics, the mortality risk for children coming from poor households is almost twice as high as for children from prosperous families while it is 1.7 times as high for children living in rural regions in comparison with children living in the cities. On the other hand, the chance to survive of children of mothers who attended at least one secondary school is three times as high.

UNICEF 2015. Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed. Progress Report. Link: http://www.unicef.de/presse/2015/kindersterblichkeit/87024
und die diesem Bericht zugrunde liegende Publikation
D. You et al. Global, regional, and national levels and trends in under-5 mortality between 1990 and 2015, with scenario-based projections to 2030: a systematic analysis by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. The Lancet. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00120-8

and in addition the portals … http://data.unicef.org/nutrition/malnutrition.html and www.childinfo.org

as well as specially for Zambia…
http://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/database/countries/zmb/en/