Identifying residual hotspots and mapping lower respiratory infection morbidity and mortality in African children from 2000 to 2017
Published September 30, 2019, in Nature Microbiology (opens in a new window)
Abstract
Lower respiratory infections (LRIs) are the leading cause of death in children under the age of 5, despite the existence of vaccines against many of their aetiologies. Furthermore, more than half of these deaths occur in Africa. Geospatial models can provide highly detailed estimates of trends subnationally, at the level where implementation of health policies has the greatest impact. We used Bayesian geostatistical modelling to estimate LRI incidence, prevalence and mortality in children under 5 subnationally in Africa for 2000–2017, using surveys covering 1.46 million children and 9,215,000 cases of LRI. Our model reveals large within-country variation in both health burden and its change over time. While reductions in childhood morbidity and mortality due to LRI were estimated for almost every country, we expose a cluster of residual high risk across seven countries, which averages 5.5 LRI deaths per 1,000 children per year. The preventable nature of the vast majority of LRI deaths mandates focused health system efforts in specific locations with the highest burden
Citation
Reiner RC, Welgan CA, Casey DC, et al. Identifying residual hotspots and mapping lower respiratory infection morbidity and mortality in African children from 2000 to 2017. Nature Microbiology. 30 September 2019. doi:10.1038/s41564-019-0562-y.
Authors
- Bobby Reiner,
- Simon Hay,
- Christopher J.L. Murray,
- Ali Mokdad,
- Nicholas Kassebaum,
- Katie Welgan,
- Daniel Casey,
- Chris Troeger,
- Mathew Baumann,
- QuynhAnh Nguyen,
- Scott Swartz,
- Brigette Blacker,
- Ani Deshpande,
- Jon Mosser,
- Aaron Osgood-Zimmerman,
- Lucas Earl,
- Laurie Marczak,
- Sandra Munro,
- Molly Miller-Petrie,
- Grant Kemp,
- Joseph Frostad,
- Kirsten Wiens,
- Paulina Lindstedt,
- David Pigott,
- Laura Dwyer-Lindgren,
- Jennifer Ross,
- Roy Burstein,
- Nick Graetz,
- Puja Rao,
- Ibrahim Khalil,
- Nicole Weaver,
- Sarah Ray,
- Ian Davis,
- Tamer Farag,
- David Smith
Datasets
All our datasets are housed in our data catalog, the Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx). Visit the GHDx to download data from this article.