Question: What is the most dangerous infection for chldren?

Sarah Burl answered on 14 Jun 2010:

About 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day, mainly from preventable causes. More than 70 per cent of almost 11 million child deaths every year are attributable to six causes: diarrhoea, malaria, neonatal (children less than 1 month of age) infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth. These deaths occur mainly in the developing world. An Ethiopian child is 30 times more likely to die by his or her fifth birthday than a child in Western Europe. Malnutrition and the lack of safe water and sanitation contribute to half of all these children’s deaths. However vaccines have dramatically reduced child mortality.
In the UK deaths in children aged between 1 month and 14 years and where a specific type of infection was recorded, 59% were bacterial, 31% viral and 8% fungal.
One of the United Nations Millennium Goals is to reduce child mortality (death) by two thirds by 2015 from 93 per 1,000 deaths to 30 per 1,000 deaths. In the Middle ages it was thought to be as high as 300 per 1,000 deaths. My work is helping to achieve this goal by understanding how infants respond to vaccines in The Gambia.