The evaluation of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) by the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutrition in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. Volume 3 focuses on developments since the publication of DCP2 and will also include the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume. The DCP3 evaluation of these conditions produced three key findings: 1. There is significant difficulty in measuring the burden of key conditions such as unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, nonsexually transmitted infections, infertility, and violence against women. 2. Investments in the continuum of care can have significant returns for improved and equitable access, health, poverty, and health systems. 3. There is a large difference in how RMNCH conditions affect different income groups; investments in RMNCH can lessen the disparity in terms of both health and financial risk.

Van der Klaauw and Wang focus on infant and child mortality in rural areas of India. They construct a flexible duration model framework that allows for frailty at multiple levels and interactions between the child's age and individual socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics. The model is estimated using the 1998-99 wave of the Indian National Family and Health Survey. The estimated results show that socioeconomic and environmental characteristics have significantly different effects on mortality rates at different ages. These are particularly important immediately after birth. The authors use the estimated model for policy experiments. These indicate that child mortality can be reduced substantially, particularly by improving the education of women and reducing indoor air pollution caused by cooking fuels. In addition, providing access to electricity and sanitation facilities can reduce under-five-years mortality rates significantly. This paper--a product of the Environment Department--is part of a larger effort in the department to improve our understanding of environmental determinants of child mortality in rural India.

Each year more than 4 million children are born with birth defects. This book highlights the unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of children and families in developing countries by preventing some birth defects and reducing the consequences of others. A number of developing countries with more comprehensive health care systems are making significant progress in the prevention and care of birth defects. In many other developing countries, however, policymakers have limited knowledge of the negative impact of birth defects and are largely unaware of the affordable and effective interventions available to reduce the impact of certain conditions. Reducing Birth Defects: Meeting the Challenge in the Developing World includes descriptions of successful programs and presents a plan of action to address critical gaps in the understanding, prevention, and treatment of birth defects in developing countries. This study also recommends capacity building, priority research, and institutional and global efforts to reduce the incidence and impact of birth defects in developing countries.

In 1997 the committee published Reproductive Health in Developing Countries: Expanding Dimensions, Building Solutions, a report that recommended actions to improve reproductive health for women around the world. As a follow- on activity, the committee proposed an investigation into the social and economic consequences of maternal morbidity and mortality. With funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the committee organized a workshop on this topic in Washington, DC, on October 19-20, 1998. The Consequences of Maternal Morbidity and Maternal Mortality assesses the scientific knowledge about the consequences of maternal morbidity and mortality and discusses key findings from recent research. Although the existing research on this topic is scarce, the report drew on similar literature on the consequences of adult disease and death, especially the growing literature on the socioeconomic consequences of AIDS, to look at potential consequences from maternal disability and death.

This book which is based on the NFHS-I data focuses on the differentials and determinants of Infant and Child Mortality among three different under-5 mortality groups of states in rural India. The book first deals with the differentials in the housing characteristics, fertility behaviour of women, utilization of maternal area services, immunization and breast feeding practices and nutritional status of children among the three morality group of states. In the next stage, the levels, trends and differentials in infant and child mortality among the three mortality group of states are presented in detail. In the final stage multivariate analysis has been carried out to assess the effect of various socio-economic and maternal cream variables on infant and child mortality in rural India. This book will be very useful to the researchers, policy makers, with the programmes and research aimed to reduce Infant and Child Mortality in Rural India.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) investments are widely seen as essential for improving health in early childhood. However, the experimental literature on WASH interventions identifies inconsistent impacts on child health outcomes, with relatively robust impacts on diarrhea and other symptoms of infection, but weak and varying impacts on child nutrition. In contrast, observational research exploiting cross-sectional variation in water and sanitation access is much more sanguine, finding strong associations with diarrhea prevalence, mortality and stunting. In practice, both literatures suffer from significant methodological limitations. Experimental WASH evaluations are often subject to poor compliance, rural bias, and short duration of exposure, while cross-sectional observational evidence may be highly vulnerable to omitted variables bias. To overcome some of the limitations of both literatures, we construct a panel of 442 subnational regions in 59 countries with multiple Demographic Health Surveys. This large subnational panel is used to implement difference-in-difference regressions that allow us to examine whether longer term changes in water and sanitation at the subnational level predict improvements in child morbidity, mortality and nutrition. We find results that are partially consistent with both literatures. Improved water access is statistically insignificantly associated with most outcomes, although water piped into the dwelling predicts reductions in child stunting. Improvements in sanitation predict large reductions in diarrhea prevalence and child mortality, but are not associated with changes in stunting or wasting. We estimate that sanitation improvements can account for just under 10% of the decline in child mortality from 1990-2015.