I have seen many informative comments here, especially on the stats of the paper...
Let’s suppose your postulated “30% all mortality reduction” effect is real; on your figure on GBD cause of deaths above “neonatal disorders” occupy almost the same area. So, if such an effect is real, it likely has to affect neonatal disorders—i.e., preterm birth complications, neonatal encephalopathy due to birth asphyxia and trauma, neonatal sepsis and other neonatal infections, haemolytic disease and other neonatal jaundice, and other neonatal disorders. What would cause an effect on neonatal disorders? Weel, I wonder if many of such “neonatal infections” are not caused by enteric pathogens—or other agents that will be affected by water treatment in general (see here and this). Besides that, diarrohea might affect the mother’s health and birth weight, etc.
BTW look at this interesting Lancet case-control study (Levine et al., 2020) funded by Gates & Gates Foundation that follows children with mild and moderate-to-severe diarrhoea that seeked health care, concluding that even mild enteric infections (which might not show up as a factor in GBD) increased the risk of death overall.
Still, I wonder why clean water is not a priority for WHO and World bank (at least according to Kremer’s paper). Maybe other interventions have similarly surprising spillover effects—i.e., perhaps Malaria prevention and de-worming affect neonatal deaths, too (I’d have to check their own spreadsheets to see this).
Thanks for this.
I have seen many informative comments here, especially on the stats of the paper...
Let’s suppose your postulated “30% all mortality reduction” effect is real; on your figure on GBD cause of deaths above “neonatal disorders” occupy almost the same area. So, if such an effect is real, it likely has to affect neonatal disorders—i.e., preterm birth complications, neonatal encephalopathy due to birth asphyxia and trauma, neonatal sepsis and other neonatal infections, haemolytic disease and other neonatal jaundice, and other neonatal disorders.
What would cause an effect on neonatal disorders? Weel, I wonder if many of such “neonatal infections” are not caused by enteric pathogens—or other agents that will be affected by water treatment in general (see here and this). Besides that, diarrohea might affect the mother’s health and birth weight, etc.
BTW look at this interesting Lancet case-control study (Levine et al., 2020) funded by Gates & Gates Foundation that follows children with mild and moderate-to-severe diarrhoea that seeked health care, concluding that even mild enteric infections (which might not show up as a factor in GBD) increased the risk of death overall.
Still, I wonder why clean water is not a priority for WHO and World bank (at least according to Kremer’s paper). Maybe other interventions have similarly surprising spillover effects—i.e., perhaps Malaria prevention and de-worming affect neonatal deaths, too (I’d have to check their own spreadsheets to see this).