Bill Gates Foundation: Every day, 17,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday. Increasingly, these preventable deaths are occurring in city slums, where overcrowding and poor sanitation exist alongside skyscrapers and shopping malls. Lifesaving health care may be only a stone’s throw away, but the poorest mothers and children often cannot get the care they need. This report presents the latest and most extensive analysis to date of health disparities between rich and poor in cities. It finds that in most developing countries, the poorest urban children are at least twice as likely to die as the richest urban children. In some countries, they are 3 to 5 – or even more – times as likely to die. The annual Mothers’ Index uses the latest data on women’s health, children’s health, educational attainment, economic well-being and female political participation to rank 179 countries and show where mothers and children fare best and where they face the greatest hardships.
Ex: Among 25 of the wealthiest capital cities surveyed around the world,
Washington, D.C. has the highest infant mortality rate. The study also
found that babies from the District’s poorest wards are dying at much
higher rates than the city’s already high average.