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Effects of vitamin A supplementation on child mortality: evidence from Nepal's 2001 Demographic and Health Survey.

Thapa S, Choe MK, Retherford RD

Family Health International, Arlington, VA 22201, USA. sthapa@fhi.org

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effect of Nepal's vitamin A supplementation programme on child mortality at age 12-59 months. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Logistic regression, applied to retrospective data from Nepal's 2001 Demographic and Health Survey. RESULTS: After a number of potentially confounding variables are controlled, the effect of 100% community-level vitamin A coverage since the child's birth, relative to no coverage, is to reduce the odds of dying at age 12-59 months by slightly more than half (OR = 0.47, P = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS: The estimated beneficial effect of vitamin A supplementation on child mortality is larger than that found in most earlier clinical studies. This larger effect may be due mainly to the other health-related activities undertaken by the female community health volunteers who distribute vitamin A capsules.

Published 27 July 2005 in Trop Med Int Health, 10(8): 782-9.
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