Harvard panel to explore the path to ending child mortality

BOSTON — The Forum at the Harvard School of Public Health will host a panel on Wednesday about the steps that can be taken to reduce child mortality around the world. The event is presented in collaboration with GlobalPost and will be live streamed here, on GlobalPost’s Pulse blog, starting at 12:30 p.m.

The panel discussion comes weeks after UNICEF released its 2013 progress report on child survival. The report announced that at the current rate of progress, as many as 35 million children could die between 2015 and 2028. The event also follows up on a Special Report published by GlobalPost titled "Step by Step: The path to ending child mortality."

GlobalPost’s series, launched in September, examined what works and what doesn’t in the global effort to reduce child mortality. We found that it’s not all bad news – great progress has been made. In fact, the number of children under age 5 who die each year has decreased from about 12 million in 1990 to 6.6 million in 2012.

But of the nearly 7 million young children who still die yearly, most of these deaths are from preventable causes. And less than half of low- and middle-income countries are on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal on child mortality. The panel will discuss what it will take to go the last mile, and end preventable child deaths.

Panelists include Elizabeth Gibbons, senior fellow and visiting scientist at the FXB Center at Harvard and a former director at UNICEF, Jacqueline Bhabha, director of research at the FXB Center, Richard Cash, senior lecturer on global health at Harvard School of Public Health, and Reginal Rabinovitch, ExxonMobil malaria scholar in residence at Harvard. The panel will be moderated by Charlie Sennott, GlobalPost co-founder and editor-at-large.
 

More from GlobalPost: Step by Step: The path to ending child mortality