Premature birth is the leading cause of death for children under 5 years old. It’s also quite common across the world—but the chance of survival depends on where a child was born.
In low-income countries, an estimated half of all children born preterm will die, while nearly all would survive if they were born in a high-income country like the United States or Canada, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most of these deaths can be prevented with access to basic medical services during and after pregnancy—yet this care that is inaccessible in some communities, including many of the places where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams work, like Central African Republic (CAR) and Nigeria. In these countries the mortality rates related to prematurity are 17 and 7 times higher than in Western Europe, respectively. In CAR and Nigeria our teams support the ministries of health in improving preventative and curative services linked to prematurity—and around the world we provide prenatal care, birth assistance, and postnatal care wherever the needs are greatest.
