The abstract is read at the publisher; the summary is JClub's.
In 2023, 333,803 deaths from lower respiratory infections among ages 0–19 were avoidable using an episode-fatality-ratio frontier, accounting for 46.9% of LRI deaths.
- Why it matters: Cause-list amenable-mortality methods don’t use how often episodes occur, limiting estimates of how many respiratory-infection deaths could be averted with feasible care.
- What they did: Using Global Burden of Disease 2023 for 204 countries (1990–2023), the study computed EFR = deaths/incident episodes and defined a frontier as the 10th-percentile country EFR within each super-region, cause, and year. Avoidable deaths were calculated as max(0, deaths − episodes × frontier EFR), with 95% uncertainty intervals from 2,000 Monte Carlo draws.
- The result: Avoidable LRI+URI deaths fell 14.5% from 2019 to 2023 while the avoidable share barely changed (48.7% to 47.7%), consistent with stalled convergence to the frontier.
The findingWhy it mattersWhat they didThe result
AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.