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From the wiki itself: Note that due to differences in reporting, these numbers may not be comparable across countries; while the WHO recommendation is that all

by Para2016 9y ago

From the wiki itself: Note that due to differences in reporting, these numbers may not be comparable across countries; while the WHO recommendation is that all children who show signs of life should be recorded as live births, in many countries this standard is not followed, artificially lowering their infant mortality rates relative to countries which follow those standards. -So, how does the US record live births? Does the US count a 22 week old premature birth as a live birth? Does the EU? If it is different, I wonder if it would account for a lot of the difference.

joe_the_user 9y ago
While any given statistic is rather uncertain, a read of the long parent article gives a taste of how the US has essentially abandoned a larger public health approach to the various health problem it faces and those other countries which have instead kept this approach, of dealing with new health threats as they appear, have managed to lower maternal deaths (again for example) while the US has seen an increase in maternal deaths (and so forth).
- jquery 9y ago
  > a read of the long parent article Sloppy reporting and mixing/matching disparate statistics in an incoherent way isn't improved by length. In fact I'd argue it gets worse and the conclusion can be trusted even less.
  - zaroth 9y ago
    I agree TFA seemed to do this throughout, and it made me question the narrative significantly more than I might have otherwise. For example, why are Black women experiencing pregnancy-related mortality 4x higher than Hispanic? Lu believes that pregnant black women face the stress of a lifetime of exposure to racism, exacerbated by the experience of nine months of pregnancy. Research backs him up. Institutional racism has been linked to high-blood pressure; black women’s bodies pay the consequences of “unique stressors around racism, sexism, violence of any kind, or economic burden,” says Fleda Mask Jackson, a professor of public health who led a 2001 study on why African-American women, regardless of their socio-economic background, are more likely to have premature babies. She found that the mother’s internalized stress is likely to lead to poor birth outcomes for the baby, and believes it’s not unreasonable to infer that those stressors have consequences for the mothers too. This is entirely uncompelling.
jquery 9y ago
This is true, and if the article doesn't account for it carefully (and other biases such as age, obesity), it cannot be taken seriously. This reminds me of Japan's suspiciously low murder rate and Pakistan's suspiciously low suicide rate. What actually happens and what gets reported in aggregate are two very different things.
refurb 9y ago
From what I've read it does. You'll also find the US doing much more risky pre-natal and post-natal surgery that other countries wouldn't attempt (e.g. baby would be recorded as a stillbirth and not a mortality). First rule of statistics is if you're comparing two numbers, make sure they represent the same measurement. Second, if the numbers are different, look at all variables that might drive it, not the just the most obvious one.

joe_the_user 9y ago

While any given statistic is rather uncertain, a read of the long parent article gives a taste of how the US has essentially abandoned a larger public health approach to the various health problem it faces and those other countries which have instead kept this approach, of dealing with new health threats as they appear, have managed to lower maternal deaths (again for example) while the US has seen an increase in maternal deaths (and so forth).

jquery 9y ago
> a read of the long parent article Sloppy reporting and mixing/matching disparate statistics in an incoherent way isn't improved by length. In fact I'd argue it gets worse and the conclusion can be trusted even less.
- zaroth 9y ago
  I agree TFA seemed to do this throughout, and it made me question the narrative significantly more than I might have otherwise. For example, why are Black women experiencing pregnancy-related mortality 4x higher than Hispanic? Lu believes that pregnant black women face the stress of a lifetime of exposure to racism, exacerbated by the experience of nine months of pregnancy. Research backs him up. Institutional racism has been linked to high-blood pressure; black women’s bodies pay the consequences of “unique stressors around racism, sexism, violence of any kind, or economic burden,” says Fleda Mask Jackson, a professor of public health who led a 2001 study on why African-American women, regardless of their socio-economic background, are more likely to have premature babies. She found that the mother’s internalized stress is likely to lead to poor birth outcomes for the baby, and believes it’s not unreasonable to infer that those stressors have consequences for the mothers too. This is entirely uncompelling.

jquery 9y ago

This is true, and if the article doesn't account for it carefully (and other biases such as age, obesity), it cannot be taken seriously. This reminds me of Japan's suspiciously low murder rate and Pakistan's suspiciously low suicide rate. What actually happens and what gets reported in aggregate are two very different things.

refurb 9y ago

From what I've read it does. You'll also find the US doing much more risky pre-natal and post-natal surgery that other countries wouldn't attempt (e.g. baby would be recorded as a stillbirth and not a mortality). First rule of statistics is if you're comparing two numbers, make sure they represent the same measurement. Second, if the numbers are different, look at all variables that might drive it, not the just the most obvious one.