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What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

• umvi 7y ago
  This is a cool infographic. I wish you could break it down so you could see what the lowest hanging fruit for your own country is. I feel like a lot of times our priorities get distorted by the media and tools like this could help us focus on what will truly help the most people.
  • TCR19 7y ago
    This. It also showed that mortality rate has been roughly halved since the 90s, but I wonder if that halving has been evenly split around the world, or if it is disproportionate to certain localities. [I'd assume the latter]
    • jake-low 7y ago
      This visualization from the same source answers your question: https://ourworldindata.org/where-are-children-dying https://ourworldindata.org/where-are-children-dying In summary, it's highly disproportionate, with rapidly industrializing nations in Asia representing a huge portion of the decline in child mortality.
• trentnix 7y ago
  I looked closely but I didn’t see abortion on the graphic.
  • qbonnard 7y ago
    Look closer... How else would you explain the decrease in congenital birth defects? Eugenism?
    • trentnix 7y ago
      Zero sum, huh?
    • Jare 7y ago
      If you are suggesting that decrease is proportional to an increase in abortions, I believe you would be very wrong https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2018/changes-worldwide-abortion-rates-1990-2014 https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2018/changes-worldwid... coupled with some estimates on population indicates the total number of abortions has gone down by about 10%.
    • roguecoder 7y ago
      "Folic acid"
    • yters 7y ago
      If birth defects are passed on from parent genes, I don't think abortion can explain a constant rate of decrease. It can explain it in the 'kill all the defective' sense (Iceland), but not 'cleaning the gene pool' sense.
  • ska 7y ago
    I would think that doesn't belong in a gathering of childhood fatality statistics, pretty much by definition.
    • squirrelicus 7y ago
      I might be a pro lifer, but I have to support this distinction. Now the dark hilarity of describing the fatality rate of abortions as 0.6 per 100k abortions, on the other hand... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
    • yters 7y ago
      Last I checked every abortion kills a child.
  • Koshkin 7y ago
    It’s hard to get pregnant at 3.
• ska 7y ago
  It's an interesting layout but has an annoying feature I've noticed in similar infographics. The division looks like it should be proportional to occurrences, but it is not. EDIT: appears i was bitten by how I was viewing it originally - downloaded the graphic and it appears to be roughly proportional with areas (i.e. I didn't find more than 10% error) mea culpa!
  • ikawe 7y ago
    The chart says “each box area represents the number of deaths...” What makes you think it’s not proportional?
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      Did some quick checks; it does appear that it's area-proportional.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • lopmotr 7y ago
    It would help if the 1990 and 2017 boxes were same-width bars because people are good at estimating relative lengths, but not relative areas. But it would also be uglier and asymmetric, so maybe not worth the trade-off.
• aaron695 7y ago
  Nutritional deficiencies are interesting because to kill a child it takes a lot. So it's just the tip of the iceberg. Problem is all the children who survive have retarded IQ's (lack of iodine can be -10 IQ points) they grow up and stay poor and have more children who will die due to their sustained poverty. I really have no idea why we pump money into schools when we can target 0-2 year olds and educate them for life. You can't fix lost IQ points later on no matter what you do.
  • djrobstep 7y ago
    People are stuck in poverty because capitalism forcibly inflicts poverty on them, not because of "IQ". Poverty is a enforced policy choice, not a personal failing.
    • squirrelicus 7y ago
      That is so catastrophically false I can't even. Capitalism has empirically been, by several orders of magnitude, the most powerful force in the world for eradication of poverty. But hey, when you define poverty by relative income levels instead of absolute levels of depravation, you can say what you said. But you are forgetting the tragic suffering of the historical poor and those under socialism, feudalism, and pretty much all of history for all time. Today's $10k/yr poor live way, way, way better than the hanseatic merchants of yore. There is no enforced policy that keeps people down. People just look far down from above, even if the tide is actually, in reality, lifting all extraordinarily rapidly. Edit: sings along "I've got plenty of gold, and I'm standing in line for a loaf of bread..." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8
• roguecoder 7y ago
  Leishmaniasis is a cool case: the drop in death is partially attributable to the orphaned drug process approving a drug that had been abandoned as unprofitable. When capitalism can't save lives, governments can.
  • xyzzyz 7y ago
    The orphan drugs are unprofitable precisely because the government regulation require expensive certification before you can produce drugs. Thus, in this case, you’re praising government for solving (at least partly) a problem that the government created in the first place.
    • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
      That's like saying "government is solving a problem it created" when government builds a water treatment plant so that a small community who can't afford one, can reach water quality levels mandated by the government. Yes, but...
      • xyzzyz 7y ago
        This would be an apt analogy if the small community was legally forbidden from using water the quality of which doesn't meet government standards. Yes, drinking low quality water is probably harmful, but not having anything to drink at all is significantly more harmful.
• lopmotr 7y ago
  I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them? It might take a lot of generations, but aren't we supposed to value future humans higher than present ones because there will be more of them? I would have died in childhood without modern medicine, and have a lifelong illness as a consequence of surviving. I may pass that on to my own children. That's a problem that never happened in all human history before about a 100 years ago when useful medicine started to exist, so maybe its effects will be disastrous for the human race. On the other hand, perhaps it's OK if we evolve more dependency on technology. We already need clothes, cooking, and shelter which helps us have advantages and flexibility that animals don't have.
  • ummonk 7y ago
    Well not just children. E.g. the proportion of women needing c-sections is increasing. I don't think dependence on technology would improve human life in the long run, since the genetic maladaptation load would eventually overwhelm the ability of technology to keep up and we'd be back to where we started. But the key is that we're getting the ability to engage in genetic engineering, so realistically we should be applying technology to treat diseases to the best of our ability while we stall for time to get genetic engineering online so we can permanently stave off inherited diseases.
    • sebazzz 7y ago
      Isn't C-section for some people like a luxury to keep the body nice or something like that? Genuine question because I heard (yes, hearsay) that C-sections are for people in the USA like fashion? The again, I can't imagine any doctor, in my country at least, doing a C-section unless it is absolutely necessary.
      • dragonwriter 7y ago
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  > Infectious diseases have always been one of the major causes of child deaths, but the success of vaccination campaigns and antibiotic availability has done a great deal to reduce mortality from infectious diseases. Measles vaccination is a perfect example: the number of measles cases has shrunk by 86% since 1990. The WHO has estimated that between 2000 and 2017 measles vaccination has prevented 21.1 million deaths across Africa. > Today we also have vaccines available for tuberculosis, meningitis, hepatitis, and whooping cough. The best way to protect children against malaria today is to provide insecticide treated bednets, but a new malaria vaccine implementation program is also underway. Quoted for emphasis. Note the striking lack of deaths on the chart from autism (which vaccines don't cause).
• yters 7y ago
  By far and away abortion kills the most children. Something like 56 million globally every year, the population of the US every 6 years. Think of that. The entire US wiped out every few year. For the most part entirely voluntarily.
• fortran77 7y ago
  How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wounds on the other side of 101 and across the bay....) https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/25/popular-but-expensive-train-tunnel-proposal-splits-palo-alto-council https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/25/popular-but-e...
  • squirrelicus 7y ago
    1) https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/ https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-... 2) the diarrheal diseases generally don't need much money at all. 16oz water, fist of salt, three finger pinch of sugar. Unfortunately, the adults in charge of those children tend to remain ignorant even after the Western doctors tell them about the cure. So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with family corpses, ya know.
    • jdietrich 7y ago
      >So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with corpses, but you can persuade them that it's uncouth and old-fashioned using perfectly ordinary marketing techniques. The norms of a society can be changed with remarkable speed if you write a big cheque to people who change social norms for a living.
      • nostrademons 7y ago
        Does this actually work cross-culturally? My understanding of advertising is that it relies very heavily on building associations between the product being advertised and existing positive social norms. The reason truck commercials in the U.S. always feature scruffy broad-chested men driving shiny vehicles across wide-open rugged terrain is because in the U.S. we have this cultural mythology about the frontier and conquering nature and we associate manliness with this (and with facial hair, muscles, etc.). And this works because there's already a shared cultural norm that's been built up over centuries, which most of the people who develop advertisements are familiar with and can mine for ideas. When I visit my in-laws in Taiwan, the advertisements look very different (although somehow the skinny-but-buxom-blonde has made its way over there too, despite representing basically 0% of the female population). In a past life, my primary job was getting people to click on search results faster, and my secondary job was making sure Google stayed in the press for positive reasons. A lot of this was data-driven, but when it came to adapting changes to individual countries, we'd always defer to the local teams. Google.kr looks different from Google.ru, both of which look different from Google.com, and in many cases these differences were simply because a competitor had gotten to the local country first and that's what the population had become accustomed to.
• temptemptemp111 7y ago
  Hilarious. You are all basically pro-abortion and wonder how you can virtue signal about saving kids... Incurable.
• sample2448 7y ago
  Abortion
• pvaldes 7y ago
  From the chart, it seems obvious that the old strategy of hide HIV and sexual transmission diseases under the rug, to protect the rights of the carriers, is not working at all. At least not for protecting "collateral damage" children. Practically the Same children infected and killed by sexual transmission diseases in 2007 than in 1997. AIDS mortality has even increased. Same as 'iNTS' (what's this?) There is a lot of room for improving in this cluster
  • pvaldes 7y ago
    I answer myself, iNTS is Salmonella, pretty lethal in Africa and increasing
  • gingabriska 7y ago
    It's quite easy to solve actually. We can have an app where if you consent to have sex with someone then your sexual health status is automatically shared with whoever you consented to before the act. You only have sex once you get green light, otherwise you are on your own! Does it breach their right? IDK, I'll let someone HNer educate me on that. And if it's a solution then why isn't it being implemented, how can we leave it upto people to be truthful about their status?
    • fucking_tragedy 7y ago
      People can already share their STD test results, and some clinics even make their patients' results available online so that they can be verified. Technology isn't going to solve this sociological problem.
• tsjq 7y ago
  nitpick here. the visual says diarrheal diseases (10%) + pneumonia(15%) = 25% total. why is that bottom left blue box larger than 1/4 of the full box? the top left red box totals >29% , and why is that box smaller than the bottom left blue box (25%) ?