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Reflecting on Storeng and Béhague ("Lives in the balance": the politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Health Policy and Planning Storeng and Béhague (2016).) historical ethnography of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH), this commentary provides a more current account of PMNCH's trajectory since its inception in 2005. It highlights PMNCH's distinct characteristics and how it is positioned to play an instrumental role in the current global health landscape., (Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 2017. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.)

Global under-5 mortality has fallen rapidly from 12 million deaths in 1990, to 6·9 million in 2011; however, this number still falls short of the target of a two-thirds reduction or a maximum of 4 million deaths by 2015. Acceleration of reductions in deaths due to pneumonia and diarrhoea, which together account for about 2 million child deaths every year, is essential if the target is to be met. Scaling up of existing interventions against the two diseases to 80% and immunisation to 90% would eliminate more than two-thirds of deaths from these two diseases at a cost of US$6·715 billion by 2025. Modelling in this report shows that if all countries could attain the rates of decline of the regional leaders, then cause-specific death rates of fewer than three deaths per 1000 livebirths from pneumonia and less than one death per 1000 livebirths from diarrhoea could be achieved by 2025. These rates are those at which preventable deaths have been avoided. Increasing of awareness of the size of the problem; strengthening of leadership, intersectoral collaboration, and resource mobilisation; and increasing of efficiency through the selection of the optimum mix of a growing set of cost-effective interventions depending on local contexts are the priority actions needed to achieve the goal of ending preventable deaths from pneumonia and diarrhoea by 2025., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Ultimately, the health and quality of life of all human beings depend upon the environment and ecosystems to which we are directly and indirectly connected. The papers in this special edition address a number of the critical environmental health issues on which U.S. government agencies and their collaborating partners are engaged internationally. The agencies are members of the International Environmental Health Subcommittee, chaired by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The activities described span the range from global policy to country-level field activities. While environmental factors related to infectious disease dominate the global burden of environmentally-related disease, acute and chronic exposures to chemicals are increasingly important public health issues at the local, national, and regional levels; arsenic in drinking water is a good example. Intersectoral action involving governments (at all levels), the private sector, and civil society working together in partnership is absolutely critical to sustainably resolving the problems touched on this overview and meeting the environmental health challenges of the twenty-first century.