BMJ 2008;336:913 (26 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.39559.698287.DB
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Health minister says data showing that child health in South Africa is not improving are unreliable
Pat Sidley
1 Johannesburg
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
South Africa’s health minister, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has become embroiled in a dispute over statistics surrounding the country’s poor performance in crucial areas of maternal and child health.
At the recent conference on mother and child health in Cape Town, Countdown to 2015 Maternal Newborn and Child Survival, she dismissed figures compiled and presented to the conference by the World Health Organization and other UN organisations, which show that South Africa has higher child mortality now than it did in the apartheid years, citing problems with baseline data.
The figures produced by WHO show that between 1990 and 2006 the mortality rate of children under 5 increased by 15%. If South Africa wants to achieve the millennium development goal of reducing under-5 mortality by two thirds between 1990 and 2015, it will need to reduce child mortality by 14% a year until 2015.
South Africa was ranked among the 10
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