RESEARCH ARTICLE
Direct estimates of cause-specific mortality fractions and rates of under-five deaths in the northern and southern regions of Nigeria by verbal autopsy interview Adeyinka Adewemimo1, Henry D. Kalter2*, Jamie Perin2,3, Alain K. Koffi2, John Quinley4, Robert E. Black2
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1 Department of Planning, Research, and Statistics, Federal Ministry of Health, Abuja, Nigeria, 2 Institute for International Programs, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, United States of America, 3 Center for Child and Community Health Research, Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States of America, 4 UNICEF, New York, NY, United States of America *
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OPEN ACCESS Citation: Adewemimo A, Kalter HD, Perin J, Koffi AK, Quinley J, Black RE (2017) Direct estimates of cause-specific mortality fractions and rates of under-five deaths in the northern and southern regions of Nigeria by verbal autopsy interview. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0178129. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0178129 Editor: Kelli K. Ryckman, Univesity of Iowa, UNITED STATES Received: January 23, 2017 Accepted: May 9, 2017 Published: May 31, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Adewemimo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Relevant data are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo. 569864. Funding: Funding for the Nigeria VASA study field work was provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) , Nigeria and the Office of Population and Reproductive Health, USAID, Washington D.C., through a Leader with Associates (LWA) Cooperative Agreement under the terms of award
Abstract Nigeria’s under-five mortality rate is the eighth highest in the world. Identifying the causes of under-five deaths is crucial to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3 by 2030 and improving child survival. National and international bodies collaborated in this study to provide the first ever direct estimates of the causes of under-five mortality in Nigeria. Verbal autopsy interviews were conducted of a representative sample of 986 neonatal and 2,268 1–59 month old deaths from 2008 to 2013 identified by the 2013 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. Cause of death was assigned by physician coding and computerized expert algorithms arranged in a hierarchy. National and regional estimates of age distributions, mortality rates and cause proportions, and zonal- and age-specific mortality fractions and rates for leading causes of death were evaluated. More under-fives and 1–59 month olds in the South, respectively, died as neonates (N = 24.1%, S = 32.5%, p
