Rate
The under-5 mortality rate is the number of children who die by the age of five, per thousand live births per year. In 2011, the world average was 51 (5.1%), down from 87 (8.7%) in 1990. The average was 7 in developed countries and 57 developing countries, including 109 in sub-saharan Africa. Likewise, there are disparities between wealthy and poor households in developing countries. According to a Save the Children paper, children from the poorest households in India are three times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than those from the richest households. However, there are also limitations in calculating an accurate rate in developing countries, especially in rural areas. An ethnographic study in Pacatuba, Brazil, found that the under-5 mortality rate only accounted for 44.4% of the actual deaths that occurred in the community. High travel costs, lost labor, and a withdrawal of socio-economic benefits are factors as to why deaths may not be reported to government vital statistics agencies within a country.
Read more about this topic: Child Mortality
Famous quotes containing the word rate:
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
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—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)