Global infant mortality: modest improvements

12 years on, the worlds commitment to the Millennium Develop-ment Goal 4 (MDG 4) - which set out to reduce the mortality rate of children aged five and under to two-thirds between 1992 and 2015- seems to have born substantial fruit.
Although only three years remain before the deadline in 2015, and figuratively speaking there is a marked possibility that the target may be missed at a global level, the fact that the under-five mortality rate has gone down 41 percent worldwide shows a sound improvement over statistics from the last decade.
From an average 87 deaths per 1,000 live births recorded during 1990, the figure has gone down to 51 death recorded in 2011, according to a report prepared by The United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME), which updates child mortality estimates annually for monitoring progress.
This report, which presents the UN-IGMEs latest estimates of under-five, infant and neonatal mortality at both regional and global levels, points out that the number of under-five deaths worldwide has declined from nearly 12 million children in 1990 to 6.9 million in 2011. This implies that while there are 14,000 fewer children dying every day in 2011 than in 1999, the figure for actual mortalities of children under five years of age is still as high as 19,000 deaths per day.
The figures however, speak volumes about the progress being made in the real problem areas, namely the 25 countries in which 80 percent of the worlds under-five deaths are still reported. Overall, the report cites India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and China as the five countries where nearly 50 percent of all global child mortalities were still being reported, as of 2011.
While the annual rate of reduction of child mortalities has overall accelerated somewhat, these regions, including Northern Africa, Caribbean and South Asia still remain vulnerable while Sub-Saharan region of Africa still continues to fare worse than average- reporting the death of one in every nine children before the age of five.
According to WHO, another facet of the under-five mortality rate in children is the neonatal mortality- which characterizes deaths that occur within the first month after birth. It remains a sizable concern for countries such as Pakistan and India, as neonatal fatalities account for more than half of all deaths reported for children under five years in these countries, mainly because the lack of a health infrastructure that ensures the well-being of newly-born children.
Through policy making that carries effective preventive and curative interventions tackling the main culprits of neonatal deaths- including pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition- these regions can effectively reduce the rate of child mortalities, according to the report, which simply equates an improved health system with improved results.
Talking beyond statistics however, the fact remains that millions of children across the globe still die each day due to preventable causes and diseases for which treatment and lifesaving interventions exist, and that too only because of a lack of knowledge and the most basic of healthcare facilities. It is hence imperative that issues such as availability of critical health services and the removal of financial and social barriers to accessing basic services be carried out on a high priority basis within the region to tackle infant mortality head on.