British Expats - Medical advances

I've mentioned this before but I think it deserves mentioning again.

Every now and again we hear Mr or Mrs Average moaning about the state of this or that health service. I don't think that they understand just how dire things were in the past. Whilst dabbling in a favourite pastime of mine, family history, I decided to take a look at one name, an Alice Chambers, simply because I lost track of her about 1871 and decided to see if she'd died about then and once again was struck by the number of children who didn't make it. So here are some statistics taken from FREEBMD for deaths of all Alice Chambers in the UK between March 1871 and March 1881.

Alice Chambers: 44 UK deaths in total.
0-5 years: 34 deaths
5-10 years: 2 deaths
10-20 years: 0 deaths
20-50 years: 3 deaths
50+ years: 5 deaths

It's chilling when we see this and it puts all our petty problems into perspective. The basic struggle simply to raise children, something we take for granted today, is something we cannot understand as it's so far outside our experience.

I know that times have improved our living conditions and medical advances have worked wonders, and we should be thankful for that, but it made me wonder whether similar circumstances still exist elsewhere today with similar results.