Essay On Infant Mortality

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Infant mortality is one of the important and widely used health indicators in the United State. While the definite cause of the infant mortality is still unknown, there are factors that are associated with the infant death. By looking at the trends between the trends between 1960 and 1995, we learn about many of these factors. Infant mortality rate declined slowly from 1960 to 1964, perhaps that is because the gap in mortality between black and white infants narrowed dramatically in this time period. Further more, post-neonatal mortality declined more rapidly than neonatal mortality. In addition, mortality from most infectious diseases declined rapidly from 1960 except for infections specific to the perinatal period, which increase infant …show more content…
Risk factors like race predisposed infants to death in this particular period. Several studies has examined the extent to which infant mortality rate differences are related to race. The result suggested that there is a gap between black and white infants. From 1971 to 1988, the mortality rate for black infants declined much more slowly than the decline for white infants (Marian et al, 1998). On the other hand, infant deaths occurring during the first week of life declined, which was initially the most frequent period of infant death. These different rates of decline resulted in a shift in the distribution of infant deaths by age. Infant mortality rate from infections diseases, including infections specific to the perinatal period has also declined, which reflected the improvements in public health infrastructure (e.g piped water and sewer), housing, and medicine .
We also find that there were other causes rather than the race that account for infant death in the period between 1970 to 1995, such as short gestation and unspecified low birth weight, newborn affected by the maternal complications of the pregnancy, respiratory distress syndrome, newborn affected by complication of the placenta, cord, and membranes. According to Marian, Dorman and Rosenberg (1993), mortality from congenital anomalies, was leading cause for for infant death and it was common in white male especially in the neonatal

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