The fight against child mortality has reached an historic milestone the UN announced on Wednesday with latest estimates revealing the number of children dying prematurely before their fifth birthday fell to 4.9 million in 2022.
I assume that’s the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn’t that informative.
Child mortality is usually expressed as ‘X per 1,000 live births’ so you have some sense of scale. We’ll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.
Here’s a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: ‘The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.’ To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it’s about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.
Fantastic to hear it’s a record low but jesus fucking christ a low of 5 million is sobering.
Crazy to think that it’s dropped from 130 million in my lifetime.
This will pale in comparison to when global warming fully hits.
I assume that’s the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn’t that informative.
Child mortality is usually expressed as ‘X per 1,000 live births’ so you have some sense of scale. We’ll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.
Here’s a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: ‘The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.’ To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it’s about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.