tailieunhanh - Child health inequities in developing countries: differences across urban and rural areas

Low birth weight, malnourished and non-breastfed children and those living in overcrowded conditions are at higher risk of acquiring pneumonia. These children are also at a higher risk of death from pneumonia. Prevention is key, including early recognition and detection, immunization (measles, HIB and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines), adequate nutrition and exclusive breastfeeding. Infants of less than six months of age, who are not breastfed, have a risk of dying from pneumonia five times greater than infants who are exclusively breastfed for the first six months. Early detection and case management of pneumonia and other common illnesses, guided by the. | International Journal for Equity in Health BioMed Central Research Child health inequities in developing countries differences across urban and rural areas Jean-Christophe Fotso Open Access Address African Population Health Research Center APHRC . Box 10787 00100 GPO Nairobi Kenya Email Jean-Christophe Fotso -jcfotso@ Corresponding author Published II July 2006 Received 20 May 2005 International Journal for Equity in Health 2006 5 9 doi 1475-9276-5-9 Accepted 11 July 2006 This article is available from http content 5 1 9 2006 Fotso licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http licenses by which permits unrestricted use distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Objectives To document and compare the magnitude of inequities in child malnutrition across urban and rural areas and to investigate the extent to which within-urban disparities in child malnutrition are accounted for by the characteristics of communities households and individuals. Methods The most recent data sets available from the Demographic and Health Surveys DHS of 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa SSA are used. The selection criteria were set to ensure that the number of countries their geographical spread across Western Central and Eastern Southern Africa and their socioeconomic diversities constitute a good yardstick for the region and allow us to draw some generalizations. A household wealth index is constructed in each country and area urban rural and the odds ratio between its uppermost and lowermost category derived from multilevel logistic models is used as a measure of socioeconomic inequalities. Control variables include mother s and father s education community socioeconomic status SES designed to represent the broad socio-economic ecology of the neighborhoods in which families .