India Should Focus on Mother, Child Nutrition, Researchers Say

India should set up a national health-care program and focus on nutritional deficiencies in babies and mothers to ease the world’s greatest burden of maternal and infant deaths, according to a paper published today in the Lancet.

At least 1.8 million children die before their fifth birthday and 68,000 women lose their lives because of pregnancy-related complications each year, Indian and British researchers wrote in the medical journal. One-third of all children born in the country have a low birth weight, a condition brought about by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy and genetic and environmental factors, they said.