[avalind]

This report[1] claims that the difference in reporting child mortality isn't the chief cause of the difference in infant mortality between the U.S and similarly developed countries. Instead the claim that most of this difference is due to the high percentage of pre-term births in the US compared to other developed countries.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.pdf

[tptacek]

Isn't a preterm baby which fails to survive exactly the kind of event that wouldn't be documented as an infant mortality at all in a less rigorous country?

[avalind]

Yes. But I'm not sure I follow here, both Sweden and the US use the same criteria to report a live birth (All live births are reported) and seem to use the same definition of Infant mortality rate, (Death before first birthday). I fail to see how reporting differences explain the difference in infant mortality between the two countries. Of course, compared to countries that use extra conditions for live births (weight limits etc.) the US would get a higher rate of infant mortality due to having more laxed conditions for what constitutes a live birth.

[tptacek]

It would be shocking if the US had infant mortality rates that were apples-apples close to Sweden. Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous.

The lede on stories about US infant mortality isn't that Sweden outdoes us. It's things like "the US ranks alongside Qatar and Croatia". Those are the assertions I think we need to be more careful about.

[grecy]

> Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous.

The population has no impact when we're looking at per-capita statistics.

Canada and Australia have the highest immigration rates in the world, so their homogeneity is going down, yet statistics like these are not going up.

[tptacek]

That's silly. Compare Sweden to Washington State, which is similarly sized, more diverse, and has the second best infant mortality stats in the US.

The point is that Sweden is a cherry-picked comparison.

[grecy]

> The point is that Sweden is a cherry-picked comparison.

Choose any other OECD country then. The results are the same.

[avalind]

Totally Agree with you. I would think that a big reason as to why the U.S has the rankings it has is the heterogeneity of the US population.

[hollerith]

According to yesterday's article in the NYT, this trend of the US's not keeping up with this group of 14 wealthy countries was absent in 1950 and only really started picking up steam after 1980. Since the US population was already significantly more heterogenous in 1950, why didn't that heterogeneity show through in the life-expectancy data for 1950?

[avalind]

The difference in heterogeneity between the US and the other countries has probably increased from 1950 to today. But I also suspect that some of this difference in life-expectancy between the US and the 14 others is that it might be easier to implement preventive health care measures that reach the whole population in societies that have more comprehensive health care insurance by default.

It would be really interesting to see data comparing the healthiest people in the US and other similarly developed countries.