According to a new report, more than 16.8 lakh children below the age of five years lost their lives due to infections that was preventable in the country during 2010.

The study was also found that more than half of the children could not complete even the first month of their lives. It said that 52 per cent or about 0.875 million children died in the first 28 days of their life. Pneumonia was among the highest affecting infection accounting for 28.6 per cent of all deaths in children under five.

Other infectious disease that affected children included preterm birth complications accounting for 18.1 per cent and diarrhoea 12.6 per cent, the study said. India was among the five countries that accounted for 49.3 per cent of 7.6 million children who died under the age of 5 years during 2010.

The countries including India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and China also accounted for 2.4 million of global deaths from infections as well as 53.3 per cent or 1.636 million of neonatal deaths.

Robert Black of John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, the lead author of the study said, “In the past decade, the country-specific under-five mortality rate reduced at an average rate of 2.6 per cent per annum, which is less than 4.4 per cent of the annual rate of decrease needed to reach Millennium Development Goal 4.”

The study was published in The Lancet on Thursday.