Puzzling trend of baby deaths due to low birth weight disturb India

India witnesses a disturbing and puzzling trend of thousands of babies dying because of low birth weight in the last 15 years, though every parameter on the children's health front has improved in that period.

As a consequence, low birth weight emerged as the country's biggest killer of the babies, which were earlier equally vulnerable to infections, birth trauma and other diseases.

If a baby is born with a weight of less than 2.5 kg, it is termed as a case of low birth weight.

The children's health scenario improved substantially between 2001 and 2015, but public health researchers are clueless on this mysterious new trend, spotted by a new study.

In 2015, nearly 370,000 neonates died due to low birth weight – way above neonatal infection, the next big killer that snuffed out the lives of 103,000 babies.

“Death rates from low birth weight rose in the rural areas and poorer states of India. We don't exactly know the reason behind this trend,” Prabhat Jha from the University of Toronto said here on Wednesday, explaining the latest findings from his Million Death Study.

The Million Death Study is an exercise being carried out by Jha and his colleagues in collaboration with the Registrar General of India to examine the cause of 100,000 deaths through a verbal autopsy with the family members of a million randomly picked deceased persons.

The latest findings from the study illustrate a sharp increase in child mortality rates in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Punjab and Haryana, only due to poor weight at birth. Most of the increase happened in term births and not in premature births.

“We found that the number of deaths due to premature births actually came down, but there was a rise in the low birth weight related deaths,” Jha told DH. The findings have been published in the latest issue of the journal Lancet.

Low birth weight mortality rose in rural areas (from 13.2 per 1,000 live births in 2000 to 17 per 1,000 in 2015) and in poorer states (from 11.3 in 2000 to 17.8 in 2015), but fell in urban areas and richer states with the exception of Punjab and Haryana.

These deaths occur less often on the first day of the life of the babies when most birth asphyxia or trauma deaths take place. They also reported fever less often than those who had infections.

Notwithstanding these deaths, overall India has avoided 10 lakh deaths of children under five since 2005, driven by significant reductions in mortality from pneumonia, diarrhoea, tetanus and measles.