Leading causes of death among children under 5 years of age in the various population groups of the RSA in 1970

Summary The mortality rates (MRs) of children under 5 years of age in the various population groups of the RSA were calculated as deaths/1Q5 for various causes of death and groupings of causes of{jeath as classified by the International Classification of Diseases. In 1970 the ten leading causes of death among Coloured and Black children under 5 years of age in the RSA were similar to those among children in developing countries. The rank order of causes of death (in MRs/1(5) among Coloured children was as follows: gastro-enteritis (1 733), pneumonia (725), immaturity (405), ill-defined causes of death (168), nutritional deficiencies (167), measles (126), anoxia (97), 'other bacterial diseases' (91), inflammatory diseases of the nervous system (55) and tuberculosis (48). The ten leading causes of death among White children in the RSA were characteristic of children in Western developed countries. The rank order (in MRs/1(5) was as follows: immaturity (144), anoxia (94), pneumonia (46), gastro-enteritis (41), congenital heart disease (32), other accidents (19), birth injury (19), iII­ defined causesofdeath (12) and inflammatorydiseases of the nervous system (11). SAfrAledJ 1984: 6&: 717-71a The high mortality rates (MRs) among Coloured and Black infants and children under 5 years ofage in the RSA in 1970 were brought to light in an article by Wyndhamand Irwigl in 1979. A valid criticism of the article is that it did not consider the possibility that improvements in the health of infants and children in the RSA might have occurred in the 1970s and reduced the MRs related to certain diseases. It was therefore decided to re-examine this question in two steps. The first step was to determine the ten leading causes of death among children under 5 years of age in the various population groups of the RSA for the year 1970. This year was chosen because reliable figures for the numbers ofchildren in the various population groups are available in the 1970 census report. 2 The results ofthis study are reported in this article. The second step was to calculate the MRs for these ten leading causes of death for each year of the lO-year period 1968 -1977. These data would determine whether there were Institute for Biostatistics of the South African Medical Research Council and DepartmentofPhysiology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg