| Infant Mortality |
Article Index for Infant |
Website Links For Infant |
Information AboutInfant Mortality |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT INFANT MORTALITY | |
| population | |
| infancy | |
| mortality | |
| demography | |
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Infanticide , Abuse , Abandonment , and Neglect may also contribute to infant mortality. Related statistical categories:
Infant mortality rate (IMR) is the number of newborns dying under a year of age divided by the number of live births during the year. The infant mortality rate is also called the infant death rate. In past times, infant mortality claimed a considerable percentage of children born, but the rates have significantly declined in the West in modern times, mainly due to improvements in basic health care, though high technology medical advances have also helped. Infant mortality rate is commonly included as a part of Standard Of Living evaluations in Economics . The infant mortality rate is reported as number of live newborns dying under a year of age per 1,000 live births, so that IMRs from different countries can be compared. A good source for the most recent IMRs as well as under 5 mortality rates (U5MR) is the UNICEF publication 'The State of the World's Children' available at http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_18108.html. For example, the worst U5MR is 284 in Sierra Leone . (That is, 28% of all children born die before they turn 5 years old.) The 29 countries with the highest U5MRs are in Africa. The U5MR of the United States is 8, and there are 31 countries with lower U5MRs, although many of those use a less stringent definition of mortality than the US. Sweden 's is among the lowest at 3. COMPARING INFANT MORTALITY RATES The infant mortality rate correlates very strongly with and is among the best predictors of State Failure .1 IMR is also a useful indicator of a country's level of health or development, and is a component of the Physical Quality Of Life Index . But the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries based on the way they define a live birth. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a live birth as any born human being who demonstrates independent signs of life, including breathing, voluntary muscle movement, or heartbeat. Many countries, however, including certain European states and Japan, only count as live births cases where an infant breathes at birth, which makes their reported IMR numbers somewhat lower and raises their rates of perinatal mortality. The exclusion of any high-risk infants from the denominator or numerator in reported IMRs can be problematic for comparisons. The United States counts many infant births as live which other countries do not and therefore usually appears to have a much higher rate of infant mortality than similar countries. The US counts an infant exhibiting any sign of life as alive, no matter the month of gestation or the size, but other countries differ in these practices. For example, in Germany and Austria , fetal weight must reach one pound to be counted as a live birth, while in some other countries, including Switzerland , the baby must be at least 12 inches long. Both Belgium and France report babies as born lifeless if they are less than 26 weeks' gestation.2 | ||
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