Child Mortality In China
Child mortality in developing countries as well as in under developed countries have greatly affected the socio economic set up of those countries. The attempts to reduce child mortality rates have been successful to an extent along with economic and technological development of countries. However, it has been found that, in developing countries, one child from 10 children pass away before their fifth birthday, in developing countries. This statistics is alarming when compared to that of in developed countries, where the child mortality rates are at acceptable levels. One child in 143 children passes away before their fifth birthday in developed countries.
The reasons attributed for infant deaths are almost the same in all developing countries and under developed countries since, 70 percentages of infant deaths before the age of five are mainly due to malnutrition problems, acute respiratory diseases etc. The very common baseline for child mortality issue is obvious, which is nothing but poverty. Ninety percentages of children who die before the age of five are financially poor and most of them belong to socially backward communities.
Another revelation about child mortality rate is that, child mortality rates are higher in males when compared to those in females. This implies that, boys pass away in large numbers than girls, before the age of five. But, there are exceptions and contradictions for this. There are countries in which, female mortality is lot higher than male mortality. In countries like China, Pakistan, India and Nepal, female mortality is found higher than male mortality. Especially when taking into consideration, the case of China, the difference between mortality rates of male and female is quite alarming as female mortality is thirty three percentages higher than male mortality. Organizations have come forward with investigations about this strange statistics and one of the prominent reasons is the excess population in China. The ratio between the men to women population also reflects the increased female mortality rates in China. Apart from all these, disparity in ratio throws light to some other critical facts and there are reports that males are given due care and attention than females. Even though, this can be considered as a reason for the increased mortality rates of female, the credibility of this revelation is yet to be proved scientifically.
However, economic development in developing countries has greatly assisted in lowering the child mortality rates over the years. If it was 147 deaths per thousand children in the year 1980, it was reduced to a range of 80 deaths per thousand children by the year 2002. This development is encouraging, yet not so satisfying. China, one of the fast developing countries in the world in terms of socio economic set up, finance, technology and stability -could have performed better in bringing down child mortality rates. The main reason behind why decline of mortality rates is not encouraging even though rates have been declined is only because the rates have declined in developing countries, where the rates were already relatively low and the rates haven't declined that well in countries where rates were already high.