Interventions that improve nutrition and environmental conditions can also provide substantial gains toward the goal of reducing child mortality, especially when the interventions prioritize the poor, according to a study in the October 24/31 issue of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, a theme issue on poverty and human development.
This issue of JAMA is being released early because of JAMA's participation in an international collaboration of more than 200 medical and scientific journals to publish articles simultaneously to raise awareness on the topic of the relationship between poverty and human development. This initiative is coordinated by the Council of Science Editors, and presentations regarding some of the studies in this Global Theme Issue will be webcast live from the National Institutes of Health (http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=6239), including this study, presented by co-author Majid Ezzati, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established in 2000 in a declaration adopted unanimously by U.N. member countries to focus resources and efforts toward critical global poverty, health, and sustainability problems. The MDGs set numerical targets to be achieved by 2015 and use socioeconomic, environmental, nutritional, and health indicators to monitor progress toward these targets, according to background information in the article. There are concerns that the progress toward some of the health-related MDGs has been slow in many countries, making it very difficult to achieve them by the target date.
Emmanuela Gakidou, Ph.D., formerly of the Initiative for Global Health, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues conducted an assessment to estimate the reduction in child mortality as a result of interventions related to environmental and nutritional MDGs. They analyzed data on economic status, child underweight, water and sanitation, and household fuels from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 42 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Data on disease-specific child mortality were from the World Health Organization, and data on hazardous effects of MDG-related risk factors were from systematic reviews and meta-analyses of epidemiological studies.