Infant mortality declines by 18 percent in Afghanistan

The good news from Afghanistan via the New York Times:

Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said Thursday.

“Despite many challenges, there are clear signs of health sector recovery and progress throughout the country,” Dr. Muhammad Amin Fatimi, the health minister, told journalists here.

The number of children who die before their first birthday has dropped to 135 per 1,000 in 2006 from 165 per 1,000 live births in 2001, according to a countrywide survey by Johns Hopkins University, he said.

That represents a drop of 18 percent, and means that 40,000 to 50,000 fewer infants are dying now than in the Taliban era, Dr. Fatimi said. “Thanks be to God they are celebrating, laughing and smiling,” he said. “These infants are the future builders of our country.”

Actually, the number of children dying is probably even less than these figures suggest. As the Times went on to report:

The findings are probably conservative, [Dr. Fatimi] said, since mothers were interviewed about the children they had given birth to over the past five years, and health services only began to improve countrywide in 2004.

...[T]he lower infant mortality [was attributed] mainly to the expansion of health clinics to rural areas and to the better coverage of the population with basic vaccinations against measles, polio and tetanus. Immunization coverage in 2003 was 19.5 percent of the child population; in 2006 it rose to 35 percent. The target was 80 percent.