The Lancet: Ending preventable child deaths: addressing the high-risk days after birth
Colin Mathers, senior scientist at the WHO

“…For the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, WHO and other U.N. agencies are discussing a goal to ‘end preventable child deaths’ with a proposed 2030 target of 25 or fewer under-five deaths per 1,000 live births. Achievement of this target will require acceleration of current efforts to prevent child deaths, with scale-up of existing interventions, introduction of new vaccines for pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, and possibly even malaria, and increased attention to reducing prematurity, preterm birth complications, and other neonatal causes of death. In this context, it will be crucial to focus increased attention on the high-risk period around and immediately after the day of birth, and to ensure that existing simple and cost-effective interventions are increasingly implemented as part of a more comprehensive approach to obstetric and improved newborn care…” (November 2014).