Infant Mortality Rate in Cuba Raises Eyebrows

Un article critique sur le taux de mortalité infantile à Cuba. A lire absolument

The one health statistic Cuba gives the most publicity to -- and appears to spend the most resources on -- is its infant mortality rate.

On Jan. 3, the official Communist Party newspaper Gramna boasted the country had reduced its infant mortality rate in 2006 to 5.3 per 1,000 live births, considerably below the U.S. rate of 6.0, from 2004, and leading all of Latin America.

Granma noted that infant mortality was "such an important indicator, considered internationally a reflection of the state of health of the population."

Cuba had managed to assemble this complicated statistic just two days after the year ended, with detailed figures for all major municipalities. The United States by contrast needs two years to assemble all the information to make sure its mortality figures are accurate, says Mary Jones of the National Center for Health Statistics.

Darsi Ferrer, a dissident physician in Havana, doesn't doubt the Granma report. "That number is indeed low," he told The Miami Herald by telephone. "That program takes a large amount of resources" out of the system. "They don't care about 1- to 5-year-olds."

Keeping infant mortality low can certainly improve a country's overall life expectancy and at a cost much cheaper than paying for the elderly to have lengthy intensive care stays in their last weeks of life. But the issue is how Cuba goes about keeping its death rate among infants down.

Un article critique sur le taux de mortalité infantile à Cuba. A lire absolument. Suite.....