Giving healthy kids antibiotics saves lives. There’s a catch.
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In 1990, nearly 13 million children died before their fifth birthday, primarily from infectious diseases or complications during birth. By 2022, that number had fallen by more than 50 percent, meaning that today, about 8 million fewer children are dying than were some 35 years ago.
Overall development improvements, alongside a handful of targeted public health interventions — ensuring that skilled health care workers are present during childbirth, improving access to clean water, providing postnatal care, and expanding vaccination, to name a few — have helped ensure far more children live to see their fifth birthday and beyond.
Yet despite that progress, around 5 million children younger than 5 years old still die prematurely each year, with about 80 percent of those deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. And progress to reduce child mortality has slowed in recent years. Between 2015 and 2022, child mortality rates fell by only 2 percent, down from about 4 percent between 2000 and 2015.
