Plenty of room for improvement here, obviously. Pre-term births figure prominently, for reasons not yet well understood.
Most of the deaths are among pre-term infants and the United States has a very high rate of pre-term births, according to the report from the National Center for Health Statistics.
“In 2005, the latest year that the international ranking is available for, the United States ranked 30th in the world in infant mortality, behind most European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Israel,” the NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in the report.
“One in 8 births in the United States were born preterm, compared with 1 in 18 births in Ireland and Finland,” added the report, available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm.
“If the United States had Sweden’s distribution of births by gestational age, nearly 8,000 infant deaths would be averted each year and the U.S. infant mortality rate would be one-third lower.”
