Excerpt: In an accompanying Comment, Zulfiqar Bhutta from The Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan says: “Too much emphasis has been placed in recent years on global numbers and mortality, and less on understanding the determinants and direction of trends. Annual diarrhoeal deaths in children might well have fallen to less than 800 000 during the past two decades, but these trends are mostly indicative of gains in large countries such as China, Brazil, and India…and the overall incidence of diarrhoeal disorders has hardly changed.”
He adds: “Do mere numbers and proportions give sufficient detail about the causes of mortality…such as distribution of deaths by residence or indeed place of death? Estimations from a national mortality survey in 2006 in Pakistan suggest that more than two-thirds of all deaths in children younger than 5 years took place at home, the majority after seeing a health professional.”
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/l-pid050812.php
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