Assessing sex differences in childhood mortality

A child’s birth weight is an important indicator of the child’s health status. One convincing proof of this is the study by Kotagal (1993) which shows that infants with low birth weight are 40 times more likely to die within the first 28 days of birth than normal birth weight infants. This paper examines the risk factors that increase the likelihood of low birth weight in the Philippines using data from the National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), which is designed to assess the demographic and health situation in the country. Using the ordinal logistic regression model, the study establishes that burning of biomass fuel (such as wood and agricultural crop, etc.) and coal for daily use of cooking and heating is a significant environmental risk factor of low birth weight. Use of biomass fuel increases the probability of a newborn’s having small size at birth. Moreover, the results also show that maternal smoking increases the probability of delivering a low birth weight baby. In addition to use of biomass fuel and mother’s smoking, other demographic factors that may be associated with low birth weight are examined as well. These factors and their effects give important information to couples as they seek to reduce the risk of having a baby with low birth weight.

Reducing neonatal mortality is a particularly important issue in Bangladesh. We employ a competing risks model incorporating both observed and unobserved heterogeneity and allowing the heterogeneity terms for various causes to be correlated. Data come from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), Matlab.
Results confirm the general conclusion on levels, trends and patterns of causes of neonatal deaths in the existing literature, but also reveal some remarkable socioeconomic differences in the risks of cause-specific deaths. A remarkable finding is gender inequality in deaths particularly due to CDs in the icddr,b area which is about 70% higher for a boy than for a girl and this difference is aabout 11 deaths per 1,000 live births over the neonatal period.
Deaths due to low birth weight and other causes (sudden infant death, unspecified or specified) are better explained from the socio- economic covariates than deaths due to neonatal infections or obstetric complications.
The analysis highlights the role of maternal and child health interventions (particularly tetanus toxoid immunization for pregnant women, nutrition programs, and high coverage health services: distance to nearest health centre). Policies that increase quality and equity in child births may help to further reduce neonatal mortality.

Short Abstract
Although there are declining trends, both in the diarrhea incidents and child mortality in North-East region of India, but Diarrheal incidents still prevail in high rate among younger children. This paper finds that despite treatments are available for diarrhea and it has been universalized in North-East India, 30 percent children remains without the any treatments.
The study indicates that use of oral rehydration is also declining, in reported period despite that mothers are well aware the ORS treatment but not the effectiveness of the ORS. Secondly, level of mother education and initiation of breast feeding has shown statistically significant influence on treatment of diarrhea. Thirdly, surprisingly sanitation facilities and source of drinking water were did not show any significant association with prevalence of diarrhea as expected, but sanitation facilities show negative relation with prevalence of diarrhea. Fourthly, in the case of treatment most of the socio-economic variables have shown statistical significant viz. level of mother education, age of children, wealth index, ethnicity, religion etc. Finally, shortfall of health worker is very high and people often face scarcity of medicine in government dispensary, which compels the people to buy medicine from private pharmacy.

Purpose: to study the impact of overweight and obesity on fasting blood glucose level and lipid profile among children.
Methodology: A cross sectional study included 200 child aged 2 -12 years was done to screen for plasma glucose, lipid profile and insulin abnormalities. They were assessed by interview questionnaires, anthropometric measures and by measuring their fasting blood glucose and plasma lipid levels.
Findings: The risk for having high triglycerides and low HDL levels is more than double among obese children compared to non-obese. Physically inactive children have 7.8 times the risk for obesity compared to active children. Significant high percentages among obese as regards prediabetes state and insulin resistance. The consumption of unhealthy snacks was higher than vegetables and fruits regardless of BMI.
Value: High BMI predisposes children to many of the medical complications of obesity found in adults, in particular components of insulin resistance syndrome.

Bangladesh achieved remarkable success in issue of third and fourth agenda of Millennium Development Goals- empowering women and to reduce child mortality rates; though an infant mortality of 52 deaths per 1000 live births indicate still we have to work to do in this sector. Under-five mortality may be reduced through the combined effect of improvement in standards of living between environment and personal hygiene, existence of maternal and child welfare scheme, as well as prevention and treatment of disease in infancy. Empowering women on her way to achieve freedom on own and child health care improve the quality of health related outcome of whole family; hopefully can decline under-five mortality in Bangladesh. In this paper, impact of women’s household decision-making autonomy on under-five survival had been determined without any intermediate terms. Using the proportional hazards model on BDHS-2007 data, the household decision-making autonomy is found to be a significant differential of under-five survival even after controlling for high risk factors of child mortality along with duration of breastfeeding, maternal health care seeking behavior and socioeconomic status. This implies; empowering women can effectively make a rapid enhancement in child and mothers health strategies, along with decline in under-five mortality.

Objective: To evaluate the change of birth defects rate after the abolition of mandatory premarital health examination in 2003 in China, to get more accurate results and to provide evidence-based medical clues for maternal and child health care and public health care. Data and Method: By searching papers with “Birth defects monitoring” as the keywords, 15 papers are available in this meta analysis, involving 1439007 perinatal infants and 16093 birth defects infants. The birth defects number and perinatal infants number of 2002 and 2003 were amalgamated to calculate the merged birth defects rate, regarding as control group to compare with the merged birth defect rate from 2005 to 2008 that was the exposed group in this study. Result: By meta analysis, D+L pooled RR is 1.32(95%CI=1.13~1.53) , which indicated that the merged birth defects rate of 2005-2008 after the abolition of mandatory premarital medical examination was 1.32 times as that of the merged birth defect rate of 2002 and 2003. Conclusion: This result indicated that the birth defect rate of China increased after the policy of abolition the mandatory premarital medical examination. It is more necessary to advocate the free premarital examination to enhance medical examination rate.

Under-five mortality rate (U5MR) is a core indicator to track progress toward the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4. With U5MR declining worldwide, knowledge is needed on the age-specific distribution of child deaths to facilitate child survival policy making, program planning and recourse allocation. We used data from 198 Demographic and Health Surveys to model the relationship between the distribution of under-five deaths among children aged 0-1, 1-5, 6-11, 12-23 and 24-59 months and U5MR, neonatal mortality rate (NMR), and infant mortality rate (IMR). This was realized through a multinomial logistic regression. We then applied national U5MR, NMR and IMR to predict for 99 countries for 2008. Across the 99 countries, 40.2% of under-five deaths occurred in the neonatal period, 17.9% among 1-5-month olds, 13.7% among 6-11-month olds, 12.8% among 12-23-month olds, and 15.4% occurred among 24-59-month olds. Results are similar when only a subset of data was applied.

Childhood is a significant stage of life and deprivation during this period can have long-term adverse impact on the wellbeing of children. Reduction in infant and child morality is likely the most important of the millennium development goals, as children are most important assets of a nation. The focus of this paper is to examine the determinants of childhood mortality and child health in India and the factors explaining the differential performance of the child immunization and treatment of childhood diseases. For this purpose data are taken from the three rounds of the National Family Health Survey of India (NFHS) conducted in 1992-93, 1998-99 and 2005-06. The analysis reveals that infant mortality continues to decline and the decline in child mortality is even more pronounced. The situation regarding child immunization rates, however, is not as clear. By the time the new born is one year old, it is supposed to receive BCG vaccination against tuberculosis, measles vaccination, and three doses each of polio and DPT vaccine. But, there was only a small improvement in full vaccination coverage. Progress in vaccination coverage varies widely among the states. Treatment of childhood illnesses need to be improved, Diarrhoea continues to be a major health problem for many children. Although knowledge about Oral Rehydration Salts (