Doherty, TanyaKroon, MaxRhoda, NatashaSanders, David2018-11-062018-11-062018Doherty, T. et al. (2018). Child mortality in South Africa: Is the Sustainable Development Goal (3.2) target achievable with current efforts?. South African Medical Journal, 108(10): 795.http://dx.doi.org/10.7196/SAMJ.2018.v108i10.13436http://hdl.handle.net/10566/4185The two articles by Bamford et al.[1,2] in the recent SAMJ Maternal and Child Health Supplement present trends in inpatient case fatality rates for diarrhoeal disease, pneumonia and severe acute malnutrition (SAM), and a review of under-5 mortality and cause of death using several sources of nationally representative data. While these reviews provide evidence of some improvement, seemingly limited to the impact of prevention of mother-to-child transmission roll-out, we have some comments related to the interpretation of the data.enThis open-access article is distributed under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-NC 4.0.Inpatient case fatality ratesDiarrhoeal diseasePneumoniaSevere acute malnutrition (SAM)ImprovementArticle