IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qsh/wpaper/227741.html

Vaccination and All Cause Child Mortality 1985-2011: Global Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys

Author

Listed:
  • McGovern, Mark E.
  • Canning, David

Abstract

Based on models with calibrated parameters for infection, case fatality rates, and vaccine efficacy, basic childhood vaccinations have been estimated to be highly cost effective. We estimate the association of vaccination with mortality directly from survey data. Using 149 cross-sectional Demographic and Health Surveys, we determine the relationship between vaccination coverage and under five mortality at the survey cluster level. Our data include approximately one million children in 68,490 clusters in 62 countries. We consider the childhood measles, Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus (DPT), Polio, and maternal tetanus vaccinations. Using modified Poisson regression to estimate the relative risk of child mortality in each cluster, we also adjust for selection bias caused by the vaccination status of dead children not being reported. Childhood vaccination, and in particular measles and tetanus vaccination, is associated with substantial reductions in childhood mortality. We estimate that children in clusters with complete vaccination coverage have relative risk of mortality 0.73 (95% Confidence Interval: 0.68, 0.77) that of children in a cluster with no vaccination. While widely used, basic vaccines still have coverage rates well below 100% in many countries, and our results emphasize the effectiveness of increasing their coverage rates in order to reduce child mortality.

Suggested Citation

  • McGovern, Mark E. & Canning, David, 2015. "Vaccination and All Cause Child Mortality 1985-2011: Global Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys," Working Paper 227741, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    • Handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:227741
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://scholar.harvard.edu/mcgovern/node/227741
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mark E. McGovern, 2019. "How much does birth weight matter for child health in developing countries? Estimates from siblings and twins," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(1), pages 3-22, January.
    2. Gauri Kartini Shastry & Daniel L Tortorice, 2021. "Effective Foreign Aid: Evidence from Gavi’s Vaccine Program," Working Papers 2102, College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics.
    3. Ojewumi Titus Kolawole & Akanni Akinyemi & Bola L. Solanke, 2023. "Household Vulnerability and Childhood Immunization Status in Nigeria," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(3), pages 21582440231, July.
    4. Ismail, Sharif A. & Tomoaia-Cotisel, Andrada & Noubani, Aya & Fouad, Fouad M. & Trogrlić, Robert Šakić & Bell, Sadie & Blanchet, Karl & Borghi, Josephine, 2024. "Identifying vulnerabilities in essential health services: Analysing the effects of system shocks on childhood vaccination delivery in Lebanon," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 358(C).
    5. Marianna Battaglia & Nina Pallarés, 2020. "Family Planning and Child Health Care: Effect of the Peruvian Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar, 1996–2000," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 46(1), pages 33-64, March.
    6. Maria Teresa Solis-Soto & Deepak Paudel & Francesco Nicoli, 2020. "Relationship between vaccination and nutritional status in children: Analysis of recent Demographic and Health Surveys," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 42(1), pages 1-14.
    7. Rikuya Hosokawa & Toshiyuki Ojima & Tomoya Myojin & Jun Aida & Katsunori Kondo & Naoki Kondo, 2020. "Associations between Healthcare Resources and Healthy Life Expectancy: A Descriptive Study across Secondary Medical Areas in Japan," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(17), pages 1-16, August.
    8. Jorge Garcia-Hombrados, 2022. "Child marriage and infant mortality: causal evidence from Ethiopia," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 35(3), pages 1163-1223, July.
    9. Gupta, Aashish, 2019. "Where there is smoke: Solid fuel externalities, gender, and adult respiratory health in India," SocArXiv 45fn6, Center for Open Science.
    10. Jorge García Hombrados, 2017. "Child Marriage and Infant Mortality: Evidence from Ethiopia," Working Paper Series 1317, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J10 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - General
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:227741. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Richard Brandon The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Richard Brandon to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbrssus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.