Child Mortality and Injury in Asia

This paper presents a summary of the findings of the national and subnational surveys on child injury in this series and discusses implications of the results for child health policy and programmes. The principal finding is that injury has been largely unrecognized as a leading cause of child death. This is largely because the previous estimates of child mortality causality were unable to include injury due to technical issues. The surveys provide convincing evidence that injury is a leading cause of child death after infancy and that the types of injury vary with the age group of the child. Similar convincing evidence shows that injury is a leading cause of serious morbidity and permanent disability in children and that the types of injury with these outcomes also vary with the age of the child. The implications discussed are (1) an effective measure of child mortality needs to be developed to include all ages of childhood; (2) prevention of mortality and serious morbidity from injury in children will require a life-cycle approach; (3) continued progress on child survival programming in children under five years of age will require injury reductions; (4) since drowning is the single injury cause responsible for about half of all injury deaths, targeting it for reduction would be an efficient strategy; and (5) there are efficient strategies for targeting other subtypes of child injury as well.