SynthesisScientific reports2017
Drought and child mortality: a meta-analysis of small-scale surveys from Ethiopia.
Synthesis in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Climate Variability, Communal Violence, and Population Health in Africa's Arc of Instability: A Scoping Review of Evidence and Gaps.Annals of global health · 2026Article
- Long-term drought and risk of infant mortality in Africa: A cross-sectional study.PLoS medicine · 2025Article
- The contribution of community health systems to resilience: Case study of the response to the drought in Ethiopia.Journal of global health · 2022Article
- Predictors of exceeding emergency under-five mortality thresholds using small-scale survey data from humanitarian settings (1999 - 2020): considerations for measles vaccination, malnutrition, and displacement status.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2022Article
- "Strengthening data quality and reporting from small-scale surveys in humanitarian settings: a case study from Yemen, 2011-2019".Conflict and health · 2021Article
- Climate Change and Health Preparedness in Africa: Analysing Trends in Six African Countries.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Exploring the Relationship between Rising Temperatures and the Number of Climate-Related Natural Disasters in China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Drought severity and all-cause mortality rates among adults in the United States: 1968-2014.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2020Article
- Countrywide climate features during recorded climate-related disasters.Climatic change · 2020Article
- Article
- Health system strategies for adaptation to drought: A global scoping review.The journal of climate change and healthReview
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite the intuitive connection between drought and mortality, we still lack a sound quantitative synthesis of evidence drawn from the available data. In this study, we estimate the pooled under-five death rates (U5DR) and assess the effect of drought on child death in Ethiopia. Small-scale mortality surveys were searched from the Complex Emergency Database and then aggregated spatially and temporally with drought exposure data from the Global Drought Monitor and food insecurity data from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. A Bayesian Poisson meta-analysis was performed on 88 surveys conducted in Ethiopia between 2009 and 2014, consisting of 55,219 under-five children. The pooled U5DR was estimated at 0.323/10,000/day (95% credible interval, CrI: 0.254-0.397), which is below both the emergency and the baseline death rate thresholds of sub-Saharan Africa. We failed to find a plausible association between drought and U5DR. However, minimal food insecure areas showed elevated U5DR compared to stressed food insecure areas. Furthermore, the U5DR increases as the prevalence of acute malnutrition increases. Targeted interventions to improve the underlying causes of child malnutrition are crucial. Further, revising and updating the existing mortality thresholds, both the baseline and the emergency, is recommended.
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