View report page

This graph illustrates the remarkable advance made in the
last 50 years in the saving of life of children in their first year.
The greater part of this has been due to increasing knowledge of
the processes of infection and the consequent introduction of effective
measures which greatly reduced the deaths from infection—
particularly intestinal infections like summer diarrhoea—in the
later months of the first year. There remains, however, a hard
core of infantile mortality—the "neo-natal" deaths in the first
month—which does not respond to the measures referred to above
and which were so successful in the past.
These deaths from prematurity, malformations and the like,
need much further investigation and research. Only by further
knowledge will it be possible to introduce measures to reduce in
future the rate of infantile deaths.
16