Child Mortality and Injury in Asia: Policy and programme implications

Special Series on Child Injury no.4 This paper presents a summary of the findings of the national and sub-national surveys and discusses the implications of the results on child health policy and programmes.The principal finding is that injury has generally been unrecognized as a leading cause of child death. This is largely because the previous estimates of child mortality causality were unable to include injury due to technical issues. The surveys provide convincing evidence that injury is a leading cause of child death after infancy and the types of injury vary with the age group of the child. Similar convincing evidence shows that it is a leading cause of serious morbidity and permanent disability in children The implications discussed are 1) the need to develop an effective measure of child mortality that includes all ages of childhood; 2) prevention of mortality and serious morbidity from injury in children will require a life-cycle approach; 3) continued progress on child survival programming in children under five years of age will require injury reductions; 4) that drowning is the single injury cause responsible for about half of all injury deaths and targeting it for reduction would be an efficient strategy; and 5) there are efficient strategies for targeting other sub-types of child injury as well.