Many people see an effective preventive AIDS vaccine as the best solution to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Ten years ago many scientists had hoped that a vaccine would be available by now. Most scientists are still optimistic that vaccines will be developed and many candidates are being tested....

The interaction of fertility and infant mortality is well established. Lower infant mortality can lead to lower fertility by reducing the need for replacement births. Conversely, birth spacing improves the chances of child survival. To find out how these programs reinforce each other, a study...

The Millennium Development Goals set quantitative targets for poverty reduction and improvements in health, education, gender equality, the environment, and other aspects of human welfare. At existing rates of progress many countries will fall short of these goals. However, if developing...

In recent years, tetanus and measles are estimated to account for more than 2.5 million childhood deaths annually; measles alone may account for more than 2 million such deaths. The author reviews empirical evidence on the most effective and feasible strategies for measles and tetanus...

The author examines the Asian crisis's impact on children in 100 Indonesian villages, based on data from four rounds of the 100 villages surveys that was used to examine changes in health status, school attendance rates, and children's participation in the labor force. She finds little evidence...

The authors use cross-national social, political, economic, and institutional data to explain why some countries have stronger immunization programs than others, as measured by diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and measles vaccine coverage rates and the adoption of the hepatitis B vaccine....

Lack of sanitation and poor hygiene behavior cause a tremendous disease burden among the poor. This paper evaluates the impact of the Total Sanitation and Sanitation Marketing project in Indonesia, where about 11 percent of children have diarrhea in any two-week period and more than 33,000...

The paper attempts to answer the following questions: how can conditional cash transfer (CCTs) be better designed, coordinated, and leveraged to increase their impact on child undernutrition? How can best practices from nutrition interventions be applied to ensure maximum CCT impact on child...

The authors analyze child work in Zambia, applying two recent surveys, the Bank's Living Conditions Monitoring Survey (LCMS) of 1998, and the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour (SIMPOC) of 1999. The analysis aims at...

The authors combine data from 84 Demographic and Health Surveys from 46 countries to analyze trends and socioeconomic differences in adult mortality, calculating mortality based on the sibling mortality reports collected from female respondents aged 15-49. The analysis yields four main findings....