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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing, I had no idea about this. I have seen infant mortality numbers tossed out as evidence the US sucks and never realized the numbers were not so simply comparable between countries. I shouldn’t be surprised :/

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In terms of comparing how countries do at the basics it would probably make sense to only compare the infant mortality for babies that were carried to the full term, or within a few days at least. I'm not sure if there's global data on that specifically, but it would be interesting to see and compare.

The gestation age threshold doesn't really matter across Europe, but a birthweight threshold does somewhat. [1,2] The US doesn't look as bad for infant mortality when only comparing only births at 28 weeks or later, 2nd to last to Denmark in this [3] comparison of Canada, US and the Nordic countries rather than being almost twice as high as the rest if using 22wks as a threshold. However, my understanding is the US has higher pre-term birth rates which is certainly a confounding factor so the difference might not only be due to birth registration differences.

[1] https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1471-...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887...

The reason you had no idea about this is because it's complete bullshit. Of course other first world countries don't count it differently just to make the numbers sound better.

No, the US counts it that way for stupid reasons relating to abortion politics.

I wrote medical reporting software and yes the USA calculates it's numbers much differently than at least France and Japan. Why do you claim BS?

Because even with that, related normalized numbers are still shit. It's not just some counting problem.

"Women in the U.S. have long had the highest rate of maternal mortality related to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. In 2020, there were nearly 24 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., more than three times the rate in most of the other high-income countries we studied"

"The U.S. infant mortality rate (5.8 deaths under one year of age per 1,000 live births) is 71 percent higher than the comparable country average (3.4 deaths)"

Because you cherry pick a couple of countries and ignore the ones who don't. Obviously.

What exactly is the difference you are claiming there is between the US and France/Japan?

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