Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

The eight Millennium Development Goals, intended to be met by 2015, include this one:

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

One of the ways to prevent childen dying is to ensure that they receive injections to protect against common and dangerous infections.  Measles is a real threat to children if they are not well-nourished.  When setting goals it is good if progress is easy to measure and it should be simple to count up how many children get immunised against measles or other infections.

Have a look at the Millennium Campaign's web page on Goal 4. 

Thinking back to the time years ago when I was working in community health I have been remembering some of the experts in child health whose writings I found useful.  An outstanding one was Prof. David Morley at the Institute of Child Health in London.  He died in 2009 and here is his obituary from the Independent.  His research interests over many years included growth monitoring of children; he devised a road to health chart to show if a child's growth was falling behind.  He also studied measles and its relation to malnutrition.