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Your support makes all the difference.Global health professionals and researchers are working to measure the status of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to determine if the 2015 targets will be met.
Promising new research shows MDG 4 devoted to reducing child mortality has significantly improved in the past two years.
UNICEF's 2007 "Progress for children: A world fit for children statistical review" explained, "The benefits of reaching MDG 4 are enormous. If the goal is achieved, the deaths of 5.4 million children under five will be averted in the year 2015 alone (as compared to the situation in 2006). But if current trends continue and the goal is not achieved, an additional 4.3 million child deaths could occur in 2015 alone."
MDG 4's essential goal is to achieve two-thirds reduction in mortality in children younger than five years between 1990 and 2015.
Therefore researchers funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, US and the School of Population Health at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia published their assessment of child mortality for 187 countries from 1970 to 2010 on May 24 in the online edition British medical journal, The Lancet.
The authors wrote, "Robust measurement of mortality in children younger than five years shows that accelerating declines are occurring in several low-income countries. These positive developments deserve attention and might need enhanced policy attention and resources" and nations like UK, US and Canada might want to take note as they are pulling their weight amongst high-income nations.
The global mortality ranking scorecard for 2010 places the UK at 28, with 1 being the best and both US (42) and Canada (33) are behind the majority of high-income nations.
Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger and Nigeria still have the highest rates globally and the greatest challenge to meet MDG 4 by 2015 but theoretically not impossible given "66 countries have decreased child mortality by more than 30% in just 5 years" including Japan, Liberia, Poland, and Portugal.
54 (31 developing) countries are all on target to meet MDG 4, the study wasn't able to identify what interventions have made the greatest impact but noted, "immunisation, insecticide-treated bednets for malaria prevention, treatment to prevent mother-child HIV transmission, and antiretroviral drugs could all be aiding this accelerated decline" highlighting the need for "country case-studies" to identify if "we link the accelerated declines in mortality to the delivery of known, effective interventions? Are there policy lessons on how governments and other organisations have tackled particular child health problems?"
In the interim, here are the 54 nations that are poised to achieve MDG 4,ranked in order of country with the highest annual decline in under-5 mortality:
Maldives
United Arab Emirates
Cyprus
Portugal
Oman
Turkmenistan
Viet Nam
Sri Lanka
Egypt
Czech Republic
Slovenia
Malaysia
Serbia
Tunisia
Luxembourg
Singapore
El Salvador
Lebanon
Greece
Hungary
Italy
Peru
Poland
Libya
Nepal
Estonia
Chile
Mongolia
Austria
Syria
Algeria
Sweden
Bhutan
Cuba
Montenegro
Albania
Armenia
Thailand
Brazil
Norway
Bahrain
Israel
China
Moldova
Iceland
Mexico
Bangladesh
Honduras
Barbados
Croatia
France
Costa Rica
Spain
Turkey
Full study to be available on May 24, "Neonatal, postneonatal, childhood, and under-5 mortality for 187 countries, 1970-2010: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 4": http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/onlinefirst
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