
What are children dying from and what can we do about it? - diaphanous
https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-children-dying-from-and-what-can-we-do-about-it
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fortran77
How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with,
say $4 Billion dollars?

Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the
people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain
underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto
from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from
gunshot wounds on the other side of 101 and across the bay....)

[https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/25/popular-
but-e...](https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/25/popular-but-
expensive-train-tunnel-proposal-splits-palo-alto-council)

~~~
redis_mlc
\- Palo Alto homeowners mistakenly believed for years that the new HSR would
be buried so that the noise wouldn't affect their property values. It's a kind
of mass delusion thing, since you're looking at $2 billion/mile or so

\- Mountain View, an adjacent city, just went througn the same calculus wrt
tunneling and found it just as breathtakingly unaffordable

\- Atherton was mentioned in the article or comments, which is hilarious. They
have a city lawyer who's mandate is to not change a single thing.

\- When I say "city", I mean approx. population 40,000. So they don't have
billions to throw around, although the York family did help Santa Clara City
(pop. 10,000) spend $1.2 billion for their football stadium. :)

~~~
fortran77
The $4 Billion figure was the cost to Palo Alto, that they thought they could
make up with increased "property values" and taxes. They expected the People
of California to pay another $20 Billion or so to complete the work. All for
their precious snowflakes and property values.

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pvaldes
From the chart, it seems obvious that the old strategy of hide HIV and sexual
transmission diseases under the rug, to protect the rights of the carriers, is
not working at all. At least not for protecting "collateral damage" children.

Practically the Same children infected and killed by sexual transmission
diseases in 2007 than in 1997. AIDS mortality has even increased. Same as
'iNTS' (what's this?)

There is a lot of room for improving in this cluster

~~~
gingabriska
It's quite easy to solve actually.

We can have an app where if you consent to have sex with someone then your
sexual health status is automatically shared with whoever you consented to
before the act.

You only have sex once you get green light, otherwise you are on your own!

Does it breach their right? IDK, I'll let someone HNer educate me on that.

And if it's a solution then why isn't it being implemented, how can we leave
it upto people to be truthful about their status?

~~~
fucking_tragedy
People can already share their STD test results, and some clinics even make
their patients' results available online so that they can be verified.

Technology isn't going to solve this sociological problem.

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umvi
This is a cool infographic.

I wish you could break it down so you could see what the lowest hanging fruit
for your own country is. I feel like a lot of times our priorities get
distorted by the media and tools like this could help us focus on what will
truly help the most people.

~~~
TCR19
This. It also showed that mortality rate has been roughly halved since the
90s, but I wonder if that halving has been evenly split around the world, or
if it is disproportionate to certain localities. [I'd assume the latter]

~~~
jake-low
This visualization from the same source answers your question:

[https://ourworldindata.org/where-are-children-
dying](https://ourworldindata.org/where-are-children-dying)

In summary, it's highly disproportionate, with rapidly industrializing nations
in Asia representing a huge portion of the decline in child mortality.

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ska
It's an interesting layout but has an annoying feature I've noticed in similar
infographics. The division _looks_ like it should be proportional to
occurrences, but it is not.

EDIT: appears i was bitten by how I was viewing it originally - downloaded the
graphic and it appears to be roughly proportional with areas (i.e. I didn't
find more than 10% error)

mea culpa!

~~~
ikawe
The chart says “each box area represents the number of deaths...”

What makes you think it’s not proportional?

~~~
sokoloff
Did some quick checks; it does appear that it's area-proportional.

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roguecoder
Leishmaniasis is a cool case: the drop in death is partially attributable to
the orphaned drug process approving a drug that had been abandoned as
unprofitable. When capitalism can't save lives, governments can.

~~~
xyzzyz
The orphan drugs are unprofitable precisely because the government regulation
require expensive certification before you can produce drugs. Thus, in this
case, you’re praising government for solving (at least partly) a problem that
the government created in the first place.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
That's like saying "government is solving a problem it created" when
government builds a water treatment plant so that a small community who can't
afford one, can reach water quality levels mandated by the government. Yes,
but...

~~~
xyzzyz
This would be an apt analogy if the small community was legally forbidden from
using water the quality of which doesn't meet government standards. Yes,
drinking low quality water is probably harmful, but not having anything to
drink at all is significantly more harmful.

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tsjq
nitpick here.

the visual says diarrheal diseases (10%) + pneumonia(15%) = 25% total.

why is that bottom left blue box larger than 1/4 of the full box?

the top left red box totals >29% , and why is that box smaller than the bottom
left blue box (25%) ?

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kerkeslager
> Infectious diseases have always been one of the major causes of child
> deaths, but the success of vaccination campaigns and antibiotic availability
> has done a great deal to reduce mortality from infectious diseases. Measles
> vaccination is a perfect example: the number of measles cases has shrunk by
> 86% since 1990. The WHO has estimated that _between 2000 and 2017 measles
> vaccination has prevented 21.1 million deaths across Africa._

> Today we also have vaccines available for tuberculosis, meningitis,
> hepatitis, and whooping cough. The best way to protect children against
> malaria today is to provide insecticide treated bednets, but a new malaria
> vaccine implementation program is also underway.

Quoted for emphasis. Note the striking lack of deaths on the chart from autism
(which vaccines don't cause).

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aaron695
Nutritional deficiencies are interesting because to kill a child it takes a
lot.

So it's just the tip of the iceberg.

Problem is all the children who survive have retarded IQ's (lack of iodine can
be -10 IQ points) they grow up and stay poor and have more children who will
die due to their sustained poverty.

I really have no idea why we pump money into schools when we can target 0-2
year olds and educate them for life. You can't fix lost IQ points later on no
matter what you do.

~~~
djrobstep
People are stuck in poverty because capitalism forcibly inflicts poverty on
them, not because of "IQ". Poverty is a enforced policy choice, not a personal
failing.

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lopmotr
I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to
future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy
people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world
reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough,
will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be
even more vulnerable to death without them? It might take a lot of
generations, but aren't we supposed to value future humans higher than present
ones because there will be more of them?

I would have died in childhood without modern medicine, and have a lifelong
illness as a consequence of surviving. I may pass that on to my own children.
That's a problem that never happened in all human history before about a 100
years ago when useful medicine started to exist, so maybe its effects will be
disastrous for the human race. On the other hand, perhaps it's OK if we evolve
more dependency on technology. We already need clothes, cooking, and shelter
which helps us have advantages and flexibility that animals don't have.

~~~
flukus
> I may pass that on to my own children

A more palatable approach would be to treat you but not allow you to have
children with the same condition. In the past this has been done in fairly
barbaric ways but embryo selection offers a far more reasonable solution with
minimal limitations on individual rights.

As for whether we should treat children and condemn them to a life of
suffering, we already do this calculus with the elderly. Whether or not to
perform a procedure depends on the chances of success and the number of
quality years they can expect to have afterwards, procedures that will extend
life by a year and result in a bedridden patient are routinely skipped, it's
only applying the same to children that makes us squeamish.

My friends an ambulance driver and recently had to transport a blind, deaf and
mentally retarded baby with a chronic heart condition. The question all the
doctors and nurses in the hospital had to ask that night is whether they
should treat the child if their heart fails. For me at least the answer is an
obvious no in that case.

~~~
geargrinder
That's a slippery slope. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who should
we abort or sterilize? We all suffer to some degree, then we all die. It's the
human condition.

~~~
liability
> _Who gets to decide who lives and who dies?_

Doctors do all the time, they even have their own word for it: triage. When
resources are insufficient to cover the needs of everybody, difficult
decisions need to be made. Or as the case may be, easy decisions...

~~~
pvaldes
Is a decission reserved to parents, in this case. Triage is a term that aim to
save the maximum number of people in disasters with many victims. Not to
decide if somebody dies or lives.

People is classified in colors black, red, etc after its state. If you are in
an accident and you cry and shout repeatedly you are classified in a lower
priority than the quiet person that do not moves.

~~~
liability
Between population growth not slowing anywhere near fast enough and rapid
environment loss due to climate change, there is a good chance we'll see the
mother of all triages. Not something to look forward to.

~~~
pvaldes
Yup, "lets kill the poor and all our problems will be solved" is a trendy old
idea, trendy and deeply wrong also.

~~~
liability
I thought this discussion was about prioritizing care to children that have a
chance at a normal life (e.g. are not _" a blind, deaf and mentally retarded
baby with a chronic heart condition"_), not killing the poor. My bad.

