Until the last few centuries, there was almost no way for us to stop children from dying. It wasn’t until the rise of clean water, proper sanitary conditions, vaccines, better nutrition and other advances in health care that rates of child mortality started to plummet. As recently as 1800, about 43% of the world’s children died before reaching their fifth birthday.9 Today that figure is 4% – still woefully high, but more than 10-fold lower.
