Children’s risk of dying highest in first 28 days of birth: WHO

A child’s risk of dying is the highest in the first 28 days of life while improving the quality of antenatal care at the time of birth and postnatal care for mothers and their newborns are very essential to prevent these untimely demise.

Globally, 2.6 million children died in the first month of life in 2016.

There are approximately 7,000 newborn deaths every day, amounting to 46 per cent of all child deaths under the age of 5-years, said the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report.

The priority that most low-income countries give to neonatal mortality, now constitutes more than 40 per cent of deaths to children younger than 5 years, is a stumbling block to the world achieving the child survival Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Bangladesh is an exception to this attention proving itself able enough to bring down the rate of infant mortality.

In Bangladesh, the infant mortality rate went down by 73 per cent in the past 2.5 decades, according to a UNICEF report. During this period, the world has made a significant progress in saving the young children’s lives. Bangladesh has experienced a significant reduction of child mortality over this period, which has helped achieve the Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4) target.

But the mortality among the under-5 children must be further reduced for a substantial effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target, reads the report suggesting, at this stage it is hence important to explore the trend and determinants of under-5 mortality to reduce the vulnerability of child’s survival.

The frailty models revealed that the combined effect of birth order and preceding birth interval length, sex of the child, maternal age at birth, mother’s working status and parental education were the important determinants associated with the risk of child mortality. The risk of mortality also varied across divisions with Sylhet being the most vulnerable one.

Generating more Political Priority for Neonatal Mortality Reduction in Bangladesh is earnestly necessary as the political scientists have a long-standing interest in how and why some issues come to attract the attention and resources of the policymakers.

The social scientists who investigate health policymaking in low-income countries like Bangladesh also have considered agenda-setting processes in this important field, added the UNICEF report.

According to WHO, Bangladesh has registered a substantive acceleration, experiencing a remarkable change in child mortality rates over the last few decades. Although, WHO says, child mortality rate is decreasing over time, Bangladesh has to further reduce child’s death to obtain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).