Health outcome
Under-five mortality
Also: child mortality, under-5 mortality, child deaths, infant and child mortality
Death before the fifth birthday, counted per thousand live births. It is the summary measure by which child health is judged worldwide, and the endpoint through which household air pollution enters the global burden estimates.
Why it matters indoors
Almost everything household smoke is accused of doing to children ends here, which is both why the outcome is studied and why it is hard to read. A death before five is recorded even where health systems are thin — demographic surveys reconstruct it from birth histories — so the association with cooking fuel can be examined in populations that have no other health data at all.
The causal path runs through the illnesses that precede it: pneumonia and other lower respiratory infections above all, with low birth weight contributing at the start of life.
Two limits apply to every estimate. The exposure is a household’s reported fuel, which tracks poverty, nutrition, water and access to care so closely that adjustment can never be complete; and the death is dated but the exposure is not, so what is measured is a household’s circumstances rather than a child’s dose.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solid fuel | OR 1.22 (0.92–1.64) | children under five · home | analysis of a national demographic and health survey in Pakistan: cooking fuel of the household recorded by interview and related to under-five mortality, with kitchen location and breastfeeding status examined as modifiers | F-1751 Naz et al. Household air pollution from use of cooking fuel and under-f… (2017) | machine |
| Solid fuel | OR 1.98 (0.75–5.25) | children aged 12 to 59 months · home | analysis of a national demographic and health survey in Pakistan: cooking fuel of the household recorded by interview and related to under-five mortality, with kitchen location and breastfeeding status examined as modifiers | F-1752 Naz et al. Household air pollution from use of cooking fuel and under-f… (2017) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Under-five mortality. Coridum Knowledge G-0211, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0211/