child mortality

Worldwide, the numbers of children who die before their fifth birthdays is on the decline. Still, millions of children are being lost to diseases and complications that are completely preventable. In a study published earlier this week in the Lancet, researchers examined the reasons behind the 6.3 million deaths among children younger than 5 in 2013 — a number that’s significantly less than the 9.9 million such deaths that occurred worldwide in 2000. Nearly 2 million of the 2013 child deaths were due to complications from preterm birth and pneumonia, both of which were leading causes in 2000…
I read an interesting article today on how eating insects may save the world. The rationale: eating insects are not only nutritious (high in protein and fat), but would also help to save the Earth's resources as the human population continues to expand. According to Aaron T. Dossey, a biochemist, entomologist, and founder and owner of All Things Bugs, humans consume ~40% of potential terrestrial productivity and livestock currently takes up ~30% of the Earth's land (pasture and growing feed). With the growing population of humans, food consumption will necessarily increase. He sees insects…
When I first started this blog, I had little idea of what I was in for. I thought I had some idea from having read a bunch of blogs and found role models whose blogging style I tried to emulate back in those early days, long before I developed the persona and writing style that most of my readers love and quacks and antivaccinationists really hate. Now that I've been at it for nearly eight years, there's very little that surprises me. Much of the quackery, pseudoscience, and nonsense that I see is stuff that I've seen before and possibly blogged about multiple times before. I'm starting to…
Officials from G8 countries will be gathering in Toronto next month, and scientific bodies from the eight countries (e.g., the Royal Society of Canada and US National Academy of Science) have developed a joint statement about what the G8 should do improve the health of women in children. They begin by citing the Millennium Development Goals of reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015; they note that we've seen "some progress in global child health" but the maternal-mortality reduction goal "remains a distant target." The statement…