Women in 91 countries aren’t having enough babies, study says
- Cyprus was the least fertile nation on Earth, with the average woman giving birth just once in her life
- Women in Mali, Chad and Afghanistan have on average more than six babies.
Soaring birth rates in developing nations are fuelling a global baby boom while women in dozens of richer countries aren’t producing enough children to maintain population levels there, according to figures released Friday.
A global overview of birth, death and disease rates evaluating thousands of data sets on a country-by-country basis also found that heart disease was now the single leading cause of death worldwide.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), set up at the University of Washington by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, used more than 8,000 data sources – more than 600 of them new -to compile one of the most detailed looks at global public health.
Their sources included in-country investigations, social media and open-source material.
It found that while the world’s population skyrocketed from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.6 billion last year, that growth was deeply uneven according to region and income.
Ninety-one nations, mainly in Europe and North and South America, weren’t producing enough children to sustain their current populations, according to the IHME study.