The children's dying depends on 2 factors: (1) the likelihood a newborn will die in the first years of life and (2) the number of children born.
15% of all child deaths in 2017 – Pneumonia and other lower respiratory diseases.
12% of deaths – Preterm births and neonatal disorders.
Childmortality refers to mortality of children under the age of 5.
The younger a child is, the higher the risk of mortality.
Prematurebirth (being born before the 37th week of gestation) is one of the major determinants of neonatal mortality.
10% of deaths – Diarrheal diseases.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that diarrheal diseases are “both treatable and preventable".
Oralrehydrationtherapy is a simple treatment for diarrhea.
9% of deaths – Congenital defects.
45% of deaths – Infectious diseases.
Congenital defects are defined as physical or genetic abnormalities present at birth and include neural tube defects, heart defects, down
syndrome, microcephaly, and others.
Top 1 leading cause of children's mortality in the Philippines (2019) is the NeonatalPretermBirth.
To reduce the number of children dying, we need to know two things: WHERE and WHAT they’re dying from.
India has suffered the most child deaths: 1 million in 2017.
Boys are more likely to be born prematurely: the share of boys born before full-term pregnancy is higher than for girls.
Boys tend to have a higher birthweight than girls – which can
increase the risk of waiting to term to deliver – meaning that more boys are induced before the end of the pregnancy term.
Although boys are, on average, heavier than girls at birth, they are less physiologically mature at birth.
The Y-chromosome in boys increases their vulnerability.
Biologically, males and females are differentiated by chromosomes: females have two X chromosomes (XX) and males one X and one Y chromosome (XY).
Having two X chromosomes means that the newborn has a stronger immune system because X chromosomes contain a larger number of immune-related genes.
But the stronger immune response of females comes with a cost. It’s the reason why women are more susceptible to autoimmune disorders such as HIV/AIDS.
Sex hormones may be another key reason for weaker immune systems in males.
Males have much higher amounts of testosterone which seem to inhibit two major parts of the immune system – B and T-lymphocytes.
Overall, male hormones weaken the immune system relative to females.
The fact that boys are more susceptible than girls to a range of health conditions is often summarized as the “male disadvantage”.
In circumstances where both sexes are treated equally, we would therefore expect infant and child mortality rates to be slightly higher for boys.
Smallpox was once an extremely common and deadly infectious disease, but it has been eradicated globally back in 1977 thanks to the vaccination against it.
Vaccines create immunity in an individual by introducing a weakened or killed form of the pathogen that make us ill– such as
bacteria or viruses.
Herd immunity is a community protection that is created when a high percentage of the population is vaccinated, such that it [is] less likely that the infectious disease spreads.
When the number of people in a population that are immune against a disease is reached, such that a disease no longer persists in the
population, this is called the herd immunity threshold (HIT).
Measles and pertussis are highly contagious airborne diseases and a larger share of people need to be vaccinated to stop the transmission. Because of this, these diseases have the highest HIT rates that need to be reached.
In total there are now at least 28 human diseases against which we have effective vaccines. The smallpox vaccine was the very first vaccine.
An early form of vaccination was referred to as ‘variolation’
or more broadly as ‘inoculation’. Practiced for a long time in Asia, this was an ancient technique of deliberate smallpox infection.
In 1796, English physician Edward Jenner demonstrated another method of inoculation in which he relied on cowpox.
Edward Jenner called the procedure ‘vaccination’ after ‘vacca’ the Latin word for [the] cow because of the origin of this first vaccination from the cowpox virus.
A number of innovations came in the development of a foot-powered injector called the “ped-o-jet”.
Epidemiologist WilliamFoege developed Eradication Escalation (E2) to contain smallpox outbreaks during October.
In 1980, the WHO announced that smallpox had been eradicated.
INFANT MORTALITY- death of an infant under one year of age.