Five million children die every year — what do they die from?

People often ask me for my favorite statistic. My answer changes, depending on what I’m obsessed with at any given moment. But my least favorite has been the same for years: five million children die every year.

Not just because of the pain and loss that it represents, but especially because most of these deaths are avoidable.

But to reduce mortality, we need to understand what children are dying from.

My colleagues Sophia Mersmann and Fiona Spooner have built a beautiful interactive visualization that helps us do this for any country in the world. I’ll use it in this article to look at a few specific views. At the end, you’ll find the full interactive version that shows the data for any country you’re interested in.

The first version of this visualization gives us a global overview of the 4.7 million children younger than five who died in 2023. Each box represents a cause of death, and its size is proportional to the number of children who died from it.

There is an almost equal share split between infectious diseases — such as pneumonia, malaria, diarrheal diseases, and measles — and birth disorders, which are dominated by preterm births and neonatal suffocation. Both of these categories account for over 40% of child deaths.

Non-communicable diseases — congenital defects, malnutrition, and cancer — are responsible for 9%, and 5% die from injuries and accidents such as drowning, road incidents, or fires.

How does this differ between low- and high-income countries?

Let’s look at a low- and a high-income country to compare: Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Both the rate of childhood death and the distribution of causes vary significantly.

A baby born in Nigeria is more than 20 times as likely to die before their fifth birthday as one born in the UK.

The next visualization shows what children in Nigeria die from. Infectious diseases are a far more common cause of death than they are in the world as a whole. They account for 56% of child deaths. The largest single cause was malaria — a disease that can be prevented or treated with the right resources.

The same is true for many other infectious diseases: there are vaccines for rotavirus, the leading cause of diarrheal diseases (but only 57% of Nigerian children get the jab), for measles (only one-third), and for meningitis, and whooping cough.

One-third die from birth complications, including neonatal suffocation, preterm births, and neonatal infections. Only half of births in Nigeria are attended by a skilled health professional; increasing this would reduce the risk of complications and save lives.

In high-income countries, deaths from infectious diseases are far rarer. In countries like the UK, birth complications and non-communicable diseases dominate, as the visualization below shows. This is not because these are worse in richer countries; it’s because other causes of death — those most easily preventable — are less common.

Read my article: Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?

Almost 40% of deaths are due to preterm births. That was also my finding from writing about differences in infant mortality rates between rich countries: countries where babies were less likely to be born prematurely tended to have lower infant mortality rates.

Preterm births vary between countries for a number of reasons, including smoking and obesity rates, maternal age, fertility treatments, and how high-risk pregnancies are handled by doctors. But these factors don’t fully explain the differences. Many preterm births happen spontaneously, without a known cause, which is why progress has been slower than for other causes of death, such as infectious diseases.

What do older children die from?

In health statistics, young children — under five years old — are often grouped separately from older children. This is for a few reasons.

Death rates tend to be higher among younger children; the earliest days and weeks of life are the most dangerous. In 2023, the number of children who died before five was around five times higher than for those aged 5 to 14.

The leading causes of death are quite different, too. In the treemap below, you can see what these older children died from, across the world as a whole.

Infectious diseases still dominate, particularly in lower-income countries. But injuries — particularly drowning and road incidents — become much more prominent. As do childhood cancers.

Again, many of these deaths can be prevented. Childhood cancer deaths in countries like the UK and the US have fallen sixfold over the last 70 years. Safer roads are possible too: the number of children dying on British roads has fallen by 90% since 1980.

So when I say that most of the world’s child deaths could be prevented, I’m not just talking about protecting children against infectious diseases (although this is often the most cost-effective way to save many lives). There are many other areas where we’ve made progress and can go even further.

Read my article on how Britain built some of the world’s safest roads.

Explore what children die from in your own country

The first step toward reducing child deaths is knowing where and why they happen.

This tool, built by my colleagues Sophia and Fiona, helps us do this.

You can explore the causes of child deaths in your country, break down the numbers by age and gender, and understand how this has changed over more than 40 years.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for feedback and suggestions on this article, to Tuna Acisu for data assistance, and Daniel Bachler, Marcel Gerber, and Marwa Boukarim for technical and design feedback on the visualization.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Five million children die every year — what do they die from?” by Hannah Ritchie, Sophia Mersmann, Fiona Spooner, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.