4 Child Mortality Analysis

Introduction:

We want to see how the mortality rate of children varies over the course of history during the last 60-70 years. We are particularly selecting deaths of children who were born alive but died under the age of 5. During our analysis we notice some spatial and temporal patterns. Our major focus is on the countries in Africa and Asia, since these countries have witnessed numerous national-scale events during the last few decades. The datasets for the below plots have been collected using this tool: http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool

Here we plot the child mortality rate of various continents and for the world. We notice that for Northern America and Europe, the mortality rate has been quite low since the 1950’s. This makes sense because there have been no significant political or socio-econmic events in these two continents since 1950. For Africa and Asia, there have been several epidemic outbreaks, political corruption events,regime changes, and religious reforms which could the affected the lives of the children. The world’s child mortality rate also remains siginificantly high due to high weightage of the african deaths.

We shall now analyze a few major causes of child mortality and how these causes have affected different parts of the world.

We have plotted plotted some of the major causes of child deaths(globally) over the years. From the plot we can see that the death toll is quite for each of these causes. Deaths due to diarrheal diseases and respiratory diseases have been on a steady decline. This may be attributed to improved infrastructure for sanitation and measures to reduce pollution levels. Malaria on the other hand seemed to low in the 90’s, then there was a surge of around 2005. This may be due to big malaria outbreaks in certain regions. Since the malaria outbreaks are short-lived, the deaths seemed to lower after some time.

Here we plot the no. of deaths due to pneumonia for different age groups. From the plot we can understand that no.of deaths due to pneumonia is maximum for children with age in 1-4 years bracket. We also notice that no. of deaths due to pneumonia is on a slight decrease. The high no. of deaths for children may be because children in that age are strong enough to resist pneumonia. We notice that the no. of deaths are also comparatively high in old individuals than middle-aged adults. This may be the case of old individuals not having strong immunity against pneumonia.

Here we plot child deaths / 100000 births due to pneumonia for some countries from each continent. From the plot we can easily say that the death rate is highest for African countries. It is followed by South-Asian countries. The lowest death rates are recorded for European countries and USA. The plot clearly shows that the highest death rates are observed in the developing countries in Africa and South-Asia. This makes sense, since there is low standards of safety, medicine, and precautions taken in most of these countries. The developed countries follow strict standards of precaution and prevention, so they have very low death rates due pneumonia.

Here we plot the no. of deaths due to diarrhoea related diseases. The death are again higher in the children within age bracket 1-4 years. The no. of deaths seem to come down at an uniform rate for the children, whereas for the other age groups, the death rate is quite steady. This shows that are measures being taken reduce the risk of diarrhoea related diseases. The high death rate for children may be due to weak immunity against the diseases.