SUNDAY July 6, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) -- A new study has found a single oral dose of vitamin A given to newborns reduced their risk of death by 15 percent .

The study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was published in the July 2008 edition of the journal Pediatrics.

"It has long been known that vitamin A supplementation can reduce mortality in children over 6 months of age," said Rolf D.W. Klemm, Dr. PH, MPH, the study's lead author from the Bloomberg School's Center for Human Nutrition.

"Our study showed that vitamin A given at birth can also improve infant survival within the first 6 months of life."

In the study of 15,937 newborns from rural communities in northwest Bangladesh with over 90 percent born at home, the researchers gave half of the newborns a dose of 50,000 international units of vitamin A and gave another half a placebo with a few days of birth.

They found the death rate for the vitamin A group was 3.85 percent compared to 4.51 percent for the non-vitamin A group.

A statement released by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that vitamin A likely reduced the severity of potentially fatal infections, which are the major cause for deaths in early infancy in South Asia.

"This study supports the findings of previous vitamin A studies in Southern Asia where the evidence is now strong that vitamin A given to newborns can dramatically reduce mortality," said study co-author Keith West, DrPH, MPH, RD, the George G. Graham Professor in Infant and Child Nutrition at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"More studies are urgently needed to determine if newborn vitamin A supplementation would reduce mortality among infants in other regions, especially Africa."

"We are excited by the results of this study, that build on two previous studies in South Asia, confirming this low cost intervention can significantly contribute to reducing mortality in the first 6 months of life," said Kent R. Hill, assistant administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

"A key next step is to consider the operational issues for using this intervention."

Early in the 1980s, Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS, professor and dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health found vitamin A deficiency increased the risk of child mortality.   And Sommer, West and colleagues from Hopkins further proved that a single dose of vitamin A could reduce child mortality by 34 percent.

"Because childhood mortality is greatest during the first few months of life, a single dose of vitamin A administered by mouth to a newborn child can save the lives of an additional 300,000 children in Asia every year," said Sommer.

"That is on top of the one million lives a year that would be saved by dosing all vitamin A deficient children twice a year from six months through 5 years of age."

A health observer affiliated with foodconsumer.org cautioned that the results of the study may not be applicable to the infants in the United States or other countries because the causes for infant deaths may not be the same.