The Hidden Victory: Why Child Mortality Has Dropped Dramatically in Wealthy Nations

Sometimes scrolling through your phone feels like the world is going to end. It’s more doom and gloom than the Adam’s Family at a Sorority party.

It feels more and more like we live in a world saturated with catastrophe headlines and algorithmically amplified outrage (don’t forget, if they can keep you angry at people or others then they can manipulate you), good news feels like it’s harder and harder to come by. It slips past us more often than not, unnoticed, uncelebrated, and unshared, not because it doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t shock or make you feel a bunch of bad ways.

Sometimes, the quietest shifts are the most revolutionary and something worth talking about though.

Child mortality in rich countries has more than halved in the last thirty years.
That’s not just some inflated hope, that’s hard and cold fact. Fewer children are dying, fewer families are grieving, and fewer lives are being cut short before they ever had a chance to bloom.

And yet…why doesn’t this feel familiar?

Why This Isn’t in the Headlines

As I try telling everyone who will listen to me, fear sells, rage spreads, hope, on the other hand, doesn’t drive practically any engagement. In fact, I’m almost certain that news outlets are all rage-baiting us to manipulate us for their own agendas, like frequently. Happy news doesn’t make you scroll, it doesn’t spike your cortisol, and in the click-driven economy of modern media, good news is commercially inconvenient. Imagine that, hope is inconvenient for most news outlets.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. In fact, it may be the most important story of all that public health works, that science saves lives. That progress, however imperfect and uneven (because there are a lot of bumps in the road, it’s true), is not a myth.

According to Our World in Data and UN records in 1990, the under-five mortality rate in high-income countries was around 12 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 2022, that number dropped to fewer than 5 per 1,000. That’s a 60%+ decline in just one generation.

And this isn’t cherry-picked for just one country. Countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, Canada, France, and Germany have all seen consistent downward trends in child mortality thanks to better prenatal care, widespread vaccination (don’t come for me anti-vaxers, I’m with you on a lot of vaccines!), clean water access, infant nutrition programs, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) awareness, and some medical advancements in neonatal intensive care.

It didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t a single miracle here changing the dial, but it was a bunch of stuff working together, and it worked.

Why We Struggle to See Progress

Progress doesn’t always feel like progress (as I write this staring at my blog numbers looking like a flat line of nothing). Especially when it’s slow, cumulative, and almost completely invisible by design. You don’t see the child who didn’t die of rotavirus, or see the pneumonia that didn’t take someone’s daughter, you don’t attend the funeral that never happened.

We see the tragedies and we feel them viscerally, but the millions of quiet survivals? They don’t trend and most likely never will.

Psychologists call this our negativity bias, basically it’s our tendency to focus on bad news over good. It was useful when we were hunter-gatherers scanning for threats. If you were all excited about the butterfly and ignored the tiger in the grass…well, it wouldn’t have worked out too well for you. But it definitely works a lot less well in a media landscape that feeds on our fight-or-flight response.

And yet, that very bias blinds us to the most astonishing parts of human history, that we’re, in many ways, doing better than we’ve ever done.

What Made the Difference?

From measles to polio to whooping cough, vaccines have radically reduced childhood death rates. In wealthy nations, herd immunity means children are far less likely to encounter deadly infections.

The rise of prenatal checkups, ultrasound diagnostics, and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) has also dramatically increased survival rates for preemies and high-risk births.

Studies show that maternal education is one of the strongest predictors of child survival. In wealthy nations, nearly universal access to education means more informed health choices from day one. Not to mention although all social media is bad for our brains in some way/shape/form, it can be helpful in spreading some information that you might have otherwise never stumbled upon. Especially if you found this blog post via social media (sorry, I didn’t mean it!).

It's also easy to forget how recently clean water became more common. Diarrheal disease used to be a leading cause of death for children under five. In wealthier countries, infrastructure now keeps waterborne illness much more rare, thank goodness.

Yeah so, progress isn’t perfect, and I hope you weren’t expecting it to be. It’s not evenly distributed throughout the world yet, but it proves what’s possible. If we can cut child mortality in half in wealthy nations, we can do it globally…and we already are.

In 1990, 1 in 11 children worldwide died before age 5. Today, it’s closer to 1 in 26. That’s millions of lives saved each year.

And still, 5 million children die annually…mostly from preventable causes. So the story isn’t over yet, it’s just getting started. But, it’s a good start.

Why You Don’t See It on Your Feed

It’s not a sexy story, and it’s not polarizing. It doesn’t provoke you to feel that outrage or trigger a tribal response in the way that media companies can bottle up and sell to someone else. But that’s really the reason it matters more and why I bothered writing about it.

This story exists outside the outrage machine, it’s progress for progress’s sake.
It’s what happens when people collaborate, invest, and care in each other and in a global way.

And those stories, we need them like oxygen, even if they might not be glamorous to anyone besides the anxious pregnant mother who is well into her 30s and hoping to have a baby for the first time.

There’s also a protective element at play here, when you’re surrounded by climate fears, economic stress, and political chaos, good news can feel…suspicious. Or like a privilege you shouldn’t enjoy.

But hope isn’t a luxury for those who can afford it, it’s fuel. And data-driven hope…the kind grounded in decades of hard-earned progress…is the most powerful kind.

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Let’s Not Let This Go Unnoticed

This isn’t just an applause moment (although, I’d like to clap for those involved in moving the needle), it’s a call to action to support global child health programs, donate to organizations bringing vaccines and clean water to low-income countries, push for better parental leave and maternal care at home (yes, please, we need more paternity leave in this country!!), and also to share good news when you see it. Be the person who spreads hope, not fear.

Because when we amplify progress, we fuel more of it.

It’s a triumph of science, policy, and humanity that fewer children are dying today than at any point in human history. We’re not doomed like all the news outlets want you to believe. We are building something together quietly, brick by brick, life by life, and every saved child is a page in that story.

We may not see the headlines, but the story is there, and it’s worth reading.