Protecting women and children in conflict settings
BMJ 2019; 364 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1095 (Published 12 March 2019) Cite this as: BMJ 2019;364:l1095
- Zulfiqar A Bhutta, professor1 2 ,
- Michelle F Gaffey, senior research manager1,
- Karl Blanchet, director3,
- Ron Waldman, professor4,
- Kamran Abbasi, executive editor5
- 1Centre for Global Child Health, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada
- 2Center of Excellence in Women and Child Health, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan
- 3Health in Humanitarian Crises Centre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
- 4Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University, Washington DC, USA
- 5The BMJ, London, UK
- Correspondence to: Z A Bhutta zulfiqar.bhutta{at}sickkids.ca
A recent Save the Children report highlighted that some 357 million children, one in every six children in the world, currently live in a conflict zone.1 Almost half of them live in severe conflict settings. Wagner et al 2 estimate that a child born within 50 km of an armed conflict event in Africa has a 7.7% excess risk of dying in infancy. This equates to 5.2 more deaths per 1000 births than during periods without conflict in the same region (95% confidence interval 3.7 to 6.7). Predictably, this effect increases with severity of conflict.
These new estimates of the mortality burden are important given that the accuracy of commonly-cited crude estimates of maternal …
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