{"id":30693,"date":"2018-02-27T11:55:27","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T16:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.healthynewbornnetwork.org\/?post_type=news-item&p=30693"},"modified":"2018-02-27T11:55:27","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T16:55:27","slug":"one-country-drastically-cut-newborn-death-rate","status":"publish","type":"news-item","link":"https:\/\/www.healthynewbornnetwork.org\/news-item\/one-country-drastically-cut-newborn-death-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"How One Country Drastically Cut Its Newborn Death Rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

There were some glimmers of good news in an otherwise\u00a0grim report released by UNICEF<\/a>\u00a0this week documenting the alarmingly high death rate of newborns worldwide: Bangladesh has managed to cut its newborn mortality rate from 64.2 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 20.1 per 1,000 today. That’s 1 in every 50 births. By comparison, in neighboring Pakistan (which has the worst odds of any country) 1 in every 22 newborns doesn’t survive.<\/p>\n

For a country as populous as Bangladesh that success has translated into a staggering number of lives saved. In 1990 241,000 newborns did not live through their first month. By 2016 that figure was down to 62,000.<\/p>\n

Of course that’s still an unacceptably high number of deaths. And Bangladesh is now in the midst of an effort to bring down the newborn death rate further. But its achievement thus far is all the more notable because Bangladesh is one of just a few countries that have made such substantial strides in solving a problem that, the report says, has seen very little progress in most other poor nations.<\/p>\n