Health priorities since the UN Millennium Declaration have focused strongly on children younger than 5 years. The health of older children (age 5–9 years) and younger adolescents (age 10–14 years) has been neglected until recently, especially in low-income and middle-income countries, and mortality measures for these age groups have often been derived from overly fl exible models. We report global and regional empirical mortality estimates for children aged 5–14 years in low-income and middle-income countries, and compare them with ones from existing models.

Most studies of the causes of diarrhoea in low-income and middle-income countries have looked at severe disease in people presenting for care, and there are few estimates of pathogen-specific diarrhoea burdens in the community. The researchers undertook a birth cohort study with not only intensive community surveillance for diarrhoea but also routine collection of non-diarrhoeal stools from eight sites in South America, Africa, and Asia.

Increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) lower the content of zinc and other nutrients in important food crops. Zinc defi ciency is currently responsible for large burdens of disease globally, and the populations who are at highest risk of zinc defi ciency also receive most of their dietary zinc from crops. By modelling dietary intake of bioavailable zinc for the populations of 188 countries under both an ambient CO2 and elevated CO2 scenario, we sought to estimate the eff ect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on the global risk of zinc defi ciency.

An estimated 2·1 million individuals are newly infected with HIV every year. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have reported conflicting evidence for the association between education and HIV risk, and no randomised trial has identified a causal effect for education on HIV incidence. The researchers aimed to use a policy reform in secondary schooling in Botswana to identify the causal effect of length of schooling on new HIV infection.

Breastfeeding has clear short-term benefits, but its long-term consequences on human capital are yet to be established. We aimed to assess whether breastfeeding duration was associated with intelligence quotient (IQ), years of schooling, and income at the age of 30 years, in a setting where no strong social patterning of breastfeeding exists.

Measuring a country's health performance has focused mostly on estimating levels of mortality. An alternative is to measure rates of decline in mortality, which are more sensitive to changes in health policy than are mortality levels. Historical rates of decline in mortality can also help test the feasibility of future health goals (eg, post-2015). We aimed to assess the annual rates of decline in under-5, maternal, tuberculosis, and HIV mortality over the past two decades for 109 low-income and middle-income countries.

The days immediately after birth are the most risky for human survival, yet neonatal mortality risks are generally not reported by day. Early neonatal deaths are sometimes under-reported or might be misclassified by day of death or as stillbirths. We modelled daily neonatal mortality risk and estimated the proportion of deaths on the day of birth and in week 1 for 186 countries in 2013.

A third of the 2·5 billion people worldwide without access to improved sanitation live in India, as do two-thirds of the 1·1 billion practising open defecation and a quarter of the 1·5 million who die annually from diarrhoeal diseases. The researchers aimed to assess the effectiveness of a rural sanitation intervention, within the context of the Government of India's Total Sanitation Campaign, to prevent diarrhoea, soil-transmitted helminth infection, and child malnutrition.

Plasmodium falciparum infection during pregnancy leads to adverse outcomes including low birthweight; however, contemporary estimates of the potential burden of malaria in pregnancy in Africa (in the absence of interventions) are poor. We aimed to estimate the need to protect pregnant women from malaria across Africa.

Original Source

Confirmation of a diagnosis of tuberculosis in children (aged

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