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How paediatrician researchers are advancing child health

Five clinicians describe how their research is contributing to the United Nations goal to boost good health and well-being in children, and the challenges ahead.
By
  1. Nikki Forrester

    1. Nikki Forrester is a science journalist based in Davis, West Virginia.

One of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations is to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all people, in part by lowering global maternal mortality and ending preventable deaths of newborn babies and children under five years old. Advances in paediatric care over the past several decades have led to marked declines in child mortality. Between 1990 and 2019, global under-five mortality decreased by 59%1, but millions of children still become sick and die each year, often from preventable and treatable causes (see ‘Meeting the target’). These deaths occur disproportionately in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, which together accounted for more than 80% of the 5.2 million deaths of children under five years old in 2019, despite the regions comprising only 51% of the global population for this age group1.

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Nature 622, S5-S9 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03234-9

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

This article is part of Nature Spotlight: Paediatrics, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 08 November 2023: An earlier version of this story erroneously referred to Maya Chopra as a neurologist. Also, Chopra is running her research programme at Boston Children’s Hospital, not Harvard Medical School. Finally, the article misstated the extent of the advances made in genetic sequencing.

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