Bill Gates's Quest to Determine Why Children Are Dying

An interview with Gates about why so many newborns die in developing countries, and what he thinks he can do about it

When it comes to child deaths, the world has made great strides in the past 25 years. "In 1990, one in ten children in the world died before age 5," Bill and Melinda Gates write on their blog. But thanks to things like vaccines and better nutrition, "today, it's one in 20." 

The death rate for children younger than one month has proven harder to budge. Newborns account for 44 percent of all childhood deaths, and health experts aren't sure why. They know it might have something to do with prematurity, or infections, or complications during delivery. But they often don't know exactly what happened right after a given birth that brought death just a few weeks later. Was the baby not dried off properly? Did the umbilical cord get infected?

In order to better understand the drivers of mortality for all children, on Wednesday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it's investing $75 million in a series of surveillance sites that will gather data "about how, where and why children are getting sick and dying," according to the release. This Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network, or CHAMPS, will be spread initially throughout six locations in Africa and South Asia. It will rely on field workers to take biopsies of children who have perished and on beefed-up laboratories that will perform medical testing.  READ MORE