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Newborn survival – the forgotten milestone for achieving MDG 4

a Health System Development, World Health Organization, Regional Office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, India. Correspondence to Monir Islam (email: islamm@who.int) Introduction Globally, and particularly in South East Asian countries, child and infant health and survival has improved significantly over recent decades. Improved nutrition including breastfeeding, successful immunization programmes and scaling up of integrated management of respiratory illnesses and diarrhoeal diseases played a significant role in improving health and survival of children. Over the decades, infant mortality came down but now the decline has slowed and in many countries is stagnating. This is mainly because child deaths that occur in the neonatal period are proportionately increasing. Globally, every year 4 million newborn babies die in the first 4 weeks of life 36%, around 1.4 million neonatal deaths are in South-East Asian countries.1,2 In other words 50% of infant mortality is due to neonatal deaths in South-East Asia. Therefore, bringing down the infant mortality rate further and achieving the Millennium Development Goals for child survival will not be possible without substantial reduction in neonatal mortality.