Nigeria (Commonwealth) _ The Paediatric Association of Nigeria (PAN) has expressed dismay over the dire situation of survival in the nation, stating that children born in Nigeria have a 152 percent greater chance of dying before the age of five than children born in the Gaza Strip of the State of Palestine who are actively encountered with armed conflict.
UNICEF data shows that Nigeria has an under-five mortality rate of 110.8 per 1,000 live births, which is higher than that of destabilized nations like Syria (22.3), Sudan (54.9), Iraq (24.5), Ukraine (8.2), Afghanistan (55.7), and Yemen (61.9).
Olufemi Ogunrinde, the president of PAN and a neurosurgery professor, is concerned that Nigeria has not succeeded in dramatically reducing the number of deaths of children, even though some of these other nations have greater GDPs per capita.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, which calls for reducing under-five mortality to a maximum of 25 infant deaths per 1,000 live births by 2030, is therefore likely to be missed by the most populous nation in Africa.
It’s clear that we have a difficult but manageable task ahead of us. In Nigeria, there are an alarming 6.2 million children who have either not had any vaccinations at all or have missed nearly all of them. One of the reasons we are experiencing epidemics like diphtheria in some areas of the nation is because of these zero-dose youngsters.
Addressing at a briefing on the 55th annual conference of the association, which begins on January 17 in Lagos, Ogunrinde stated that in order to ensure the maximum welfare of every Nigerian citizen, we need to provide vaccinations and healthcare to every kid, regardless of their location. The conference’s objectives include examining contemporary issues affecting children, such as vaccine programs, brain drain, poor capacity development, and research and development.
The World Health Organization reports that children in sub-Saharan Africa have 14 times higher death rates than children in Europe and North America, despite notable worldwide success in lowering childhood mortality since 1990.
In this category, Nigeria is in the lead. From 1990 to 2020, the worldwide under-five mortality rate decreased by 60%, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births to 37 in 2020. Nonetheless, only five nations—Nigeria, India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia—account for half of all under-five fatalities worldwide.
According to Chris Esezobor, head of the scientific committee for the PAN conference and a professor of pediatric nephrology, these results underscore the necessity for ongoing efforts to address the underlying causes of childhood death.
Nigeria is one of the top five nations in the world for the highest rates of mortality for children under five. Apart from the standard primary causes of death for children under five, research has indicated that variations in sociocultural beliefs and customs among Nigerian ethnic groups have an impact on children survival, so scientific verification is required. In order to quantify the risk of under-five mortality in Nigeria, this study looked at survival probabilities as well as the effects of environmental, biological, and socioeconomic variables.
The Nelson Aalen hazard curve, the Kaplan-Meier survival curve, and the component survival probabilities were calculated. Within a Bayesian mixed effect hierarchical hazard modeling framework with geographic components, the Exponential, Gamma, Log-normal, Weibull, and Cox hazard models were taken into consideration.
The optimum model for inference was chosen using the Watanabe Akaike information criterion and Deviance. Throughout this experiment, a 5% threshold of significance was assumed. The period between birth and death, or birth and the interview date for children who were alive on the day of the interview, was the outcome variable, and the dataset from the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Study was utilized.
According to the findings, there is a 0.04% chance that a kid would die during the first two months, a 0.106 chance for a male to die before turning five, and a 0.094 chance for a girl. Significant risk factors of child mortality in Nigeria include gender, maternal education, household wealth status, source of water and toilet facilities, residence, mass media, frequency of prenatal and postnatal visits, marital status, place of delivery, multiple births, who decides to use healthcare, and use of bednets.
The risk of death is highest for mothers under 24 and over 44 years old, as well as for babies weighing under 2.5 kg and over 4.5 kg. Nigeria’s Kebbi, Kaduna, Jigawa, Adamawa, Gombe, Kano, Kogi, Nasarawa, Plateau, and Sokoto states have a high risk of under-five mortality.
Due to the fact that this age group has the highest predicted mortality, this study emphasizes the necessity for extra care during the first two months following childbirth. Improving maternal healthcare services, encouraging maternal education, encouraging delivery in medical facilities, encouraging positive parental attitudes to support multiple births, providing poverty alleviation programs for the less fortunate, and giving priority to interventions in Northern Nigeria are all workable ways to reduce infant mortality.
