Infant death rate in US drops to historic low, CDC reports

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/us-infant-death-rate-drops-historic-low-cdc-reports

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Infant mortality in the United States dropped to a “historic low” in 2014, according to a new report, which said that the rate was “generally considered a good indicator of the overall health of a population”.

The mortality rate dropped 2.3% to 582.1 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2014 from 596.1 in 2013, according to the report released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The final CDC report, which will be released in about three months, will delve into the potential causes of the decline, according to Ken Kochanek, a CDC statistician and one of the authors of the study.

Dr Steven Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University and professor in the department of family medicine and population health, said that the decline was “good news” but that the rate of decline wasn’t “any faster than other industrialized countries”.

According to Woolf, who was not involved in the report, the US infant mortality rate is twice that of Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Israel and Estonia. It is “almost three times that of Finland”. The rate reported on Wednesday is still 54% higher than the average for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 34 developed countries that compare policy and identify problems and good practices.

“US infant mortality rates – like much of its health statistics generally – have not kept pace with advances in other high-income countries,” Woolf said.

Without specifically pointing to possible causes of the recent decline, Woolf said he would “guess that it’s the same set of reasons infant mortality is dropping in all industrialized countries, not something unique to the US.”

The rates for the 10 leading causes of infant death remained largely the same, except for deaths because of “respiratory distress”, which occurs when newborns have underdeveloped lungs. The rates of those deaths decreased 13.5%, with 11.5 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2014 compared to 13.3 in 2013.

The report also found that life expectancy had remained stagnant at 78.8 years, which Kochanek believed to be the most interesting finding. The mortality rates for five leading causes of death among adults – heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respirator diseases, influenza and pneumonia, and diabetes – decreased, while four others — unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, suicide – increased. Death rates because of kidney disease remained the same.

“You take the four that increase and five that decrease and they cancel each other out which is why we saw no increase or decrease in life expectancy,” Kochanek said. “It didn’t change between 2012 and 2013 either.”

The death rate overall decreased by 1%, from 731.9 per 100,000 people in 2013 to 724.6 in 2014. The population groups that saw the largest decrease in death rates were Hispanic females (2.5%), non-Hispanic black males (2.1%), and Hispanic males (2%).