Tuesday, August 26, 2014

A Map That Can Help Explain Excess Child Mortality


Source
In Africa and Asia a lot of children die from preventable causes. Some of those causes are diseases that can be prevented by simple immunization. But as a Nobel Prize Winner once explained, "you have to put the vaccine in the kids to protect them".
This map by Benjamin Hennig reveals that the problem of unvaccinated children is largely concentrated in India and Africa with India a particularly striking case of a country where economic growth has not yet delivered much in the way of public health gains. But though the numbers of the unvaccinated in countries like the United States are much lower, in a way that reveals a much more troubling policy failure. Here the resources to vaccinate everyone are clearly present. Vaccination doesn't happen, when it doesn't happen, because of misinformation about the risks and public policy that indulges that misinformation.

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