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Saturday, January 15, 2005

Kristof, Infant Mortality and Reality Collide and it's Not a Pretty Sight.

The New York Times’ Nick Kristof has written a column on infant mortality that compares the US unfavorably with China and Cuba. There is something predictable about articles like this - and articles on “the homeless” which seem to hibernate in years when Democrats are in power only to re-emerge when Republicans take over.

Unfortunately for poor old Kristof, the blogosphere no longer allows media bigfeet to get away with statistical sleight of hand. Captain Ed at Captain’s Quarters takes Kristof’s article apart in an essay entitled “Kristof Gets Obscene.” The analysis leaves the Kristof’s facts, thesis and reputation in tatters.

Example:

Captain Ed: Rarely does my jaw hit the table with such force as it did today when I read Nicholas Kristof's latest column in the New York Times on infant mortality. Kristof compares a rise in infant mortality rates in the US for 2002 and uses it to compare us to Cuba and, shockingly, China:

Kristof: In every year since 1958, America's infant mortality rate improved, or at least held steady. But in 2002, it got worse: 7 babies died for each thousand live births, while that rate was 6.8 deaths the year before.
Those numbers, buried in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, didn't get much attention. But they are part of a pattern of recent statistics dribbling out of the federal government suggesting that for those on the bottom in America, life in our new Gilded Age is getting crueler.


Captain Ed: Apparently, it got better before it got crueler, because in 1998, the CDC reported an infant-mortality rate of 7.2, putting just behind Cuba for 28th place. (Hong Kong and Sweden were the best two places to be born in 1998.) In 1999 and 2000, the number improved to 7.1 and 7.0, exactly where we are now. So that makes the very next statement Kristof uses somewhat suspect:

Kristof: "America's children are at greater risk than they've been in for at least a decade," said Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and president of the Children's Health Fund.

Captain Ed: Neither Kristof nor Redlener are apparently capable of performing any research on the subject before commenting. In just a few quick keystrokes, I located the applicable table at the CDC and found out that perinatal death rates in the US have declined quickly over the past decade, going from 7.6 in 1995 to 7.0 in 2002 -- which, as Kristof reports, represented an increase from 6.9 (not 6.8) the previous year. In fact, the perinatal death rate was 9.1 in 1990, and 10.7 in 1985, showing tremendous progress over the past generation.

But the false impression given by Kristof on infant mortality in the...


But I'm not going to spoil it for your; read the whole article HERE.

Equally instructive are some of the comments:

Granted, China has a morally questionable approach to population control, it's not really relevant to the argument Kristoff is making, i.e. one of competence. what is highly relevant is that both Cuba and China are Communist totalitarian states. The only sensible approach to data they provide is to assume they are lying until you get independent confirmation.

[snip]

I work with mortality tables all the time (though at the other age extreme) and here are a few things I know:
- Many infant deaths are due to murder/abuse/neglect and not medical problems. - Different countries use different standards of "born alive". Some wait 24 hours before counting a child, I think. Some others may count stillbirths as infant deaths. If one has breakdown of mortality for something less crude than first year (say mortality in first 24 hours, then first month, then first 6 months, etc.) - you might see where the problem lies.- Then there are demographic aspects. In the U.S., we've got a lot of older moms. Some other developed countries have age cut-offs for fertility treatments (like at age 35), while we've got some much older women getting pregnant (whether by nature or technology).


[snip]

The primary reason Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States is that the United States is a world leader in an odd category -- the percentage of infants who die on their birthday. In any given year in the United States anywhere from 30-40 percent of infants die before they are even a day old.
Why? Because the United States also easily has the most intensive system of emergency intervention to keep low birth weight and premature infants alive in the world. The United States is, for example, one of only a handful countries that keeps detailed statistics on early fetal mortality -- the survival rate of infants who are born as early as the 20th week of gestation
.

[snip]

Ed, I would say nice job if I were not utterly floored that someone of Kristof's prominence can get away with such a blatantly incompetent spin job.

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