Child Mortality After Hurricane Katrina

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Kanter

ABSTRACTBackground: Age-specific pediatric health consequences of community disruption after Hurricane Katrina have not been analyzed. Post-Katrina vital statistics are unavailable. The objectives of this study were to validate an alternative method to estimate child mortality rates in the greater New Orleans area and compare pre-Katrina and post-Katrina mortality rates.Methods: Pre-Katrina 2004 child mortality was estimated from death reports in the local daily newspaper and validated by comparison with pre-Katrina data from the Louisiana Department of Health. Post-Katrina child mortality rates were analyzed as a measure of health consequences.Results: Newspaper-derived estimates of mortality rates appear to be valid except for possible underreporting of neonatal rates. Pre-Katrina and post-Katrina mortality rates were similar for all age groups except infants. Post-Katrina, a 92% decline in mortality rate occurred for neonates (<28 days), and a 57% decline in mortality rate occurred for postneonatal infants (28 days–1 year). The post-Katrina decline in infant mortality rate exceeds the pre-Katrina discrepancy between newspaper-derived and Department of Health–reported rates.Conclusions: A declining infant mortality rate raises questions about persistent displacement of high-risk infants out of the region. Otherwise, there is no evidence of long-lasting post-Katrina excess child mortality. Further investigation of demographic changes would be of interest to local decision makers and planners for recovery after public health emergencies in other regions.(Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2010;4:62-65)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-645
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Hubbard

Abstract This article examines responses to high rates of infant mortality in China’s northwestern province of Gansu during the Nationalist decades (1927–1949). Based on public health reports for both government and popular audiences, this article argues that the problem of Gansu’s especially high infant mortality rate was constructed to serve a particular political and economic agenda, drawing heavily not only from fascist ideals but also the logic of foreign philanthropists and Nationalist technocrats. Once established, the facts of this problem and its cause remained stubbornly invulnerable to new evidence. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it brings to light actors and institutions largely absent in existing scholarship on medicine and public health in Republican China. Second, it cautions against treating infant mortality rates referenced in the historical record as dispassionate measures of life and death. Rather, these purported facts affirm the value ascribed to reproductive health and its relevance for particular political aims.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Kok Wooi Yap ◽  
Doris Padmini Selvaratnam

This study aims to investigate the determinants of public health expenditure in Malaysia. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach proposed by Pesaran & Shin (1999) and Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied to analyse annual time series data during the period from 1970 to 2017. The study focused on four explanatory variables, namely per capita gross domestic product (GDP), healthcare price index, population aged 65 years and above, as well as infant mortality rate. The bounds test results showed that the public health expenditure and its determinants are cointegrated. The empirical results revealed that the elasticity of government health expenditure with respect to national income is less than unity, indicating that public health expenditure in Malaysia is a necessity good and thus the Wagner’s law does not exist to explain the relationship between public health expenditure and economic growth in Malaysia. In the long run, per capita GDP, healthcare price index, population aged more than 65 years, and infant mortality rate are the important variables in explaining the behaviour of public health expenditure in Malaysia. The empirical results also prove that infant mortality rate is significant in influencing public health spending in the short run. It is noted that macroeconomic and health status factors assume an important role in determining the public health expenditure in Malaysia and thus government policies and strategies should be made by taking into account of these aspects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 3681-3686

The growth of public health in India has been moderate due to low public expenditure on health, very few public health institutes and inadequate national standards for public health education. As per to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) published in the medical journal, The Lancet, India has a depressing 154th place among 195 countries on the healthcare index. India has population of 1.21 billion population and occupies the second position as the most populous country in the world. India has almost 13.1 per cent of child population aged 0-6 years (Census 2011). Mortality among infants and under-5 children is also a primary concern. In India the number of Under-5 mortality rate and infant mortality rates are very high. They are as much as 49 (Under-5 mortality rate) and 42 (infant mortality rates). The proposed framework is for improving the health of the citizens. This is a bottom up approach for improving the overall health of the nation starting at district level. Starting with treatment of areaspecific diseases and infections is an effective way to ensure good health all over the nation.


Author(s):  
Arthur Evariste KOUASSI ◽  
Ya Assanhoun Guillaume KOUASSI ◽  
Nogbou Andetchi Aubin AMANZOU

Infant mortality is a major health problem in developing countries. It is an important indicator of a country's public health as it goes hand in hand with socio-economic conditions and many others. Public health spending has been committed to reducing this scourge. This has led to the completion of numerous studies which have yielded mixed results. The main objective of this study is to test the effect of public health expenditure (% GDP) on the infant mortality rate, taking into account the role that institutional quality can play. To achieve this, we use two approaches which are the autoregressive vector panel model with exogenous variables (PVAR (X)) and the smooth threshold regression model (PSTR) on annual data covering the period 2002-2016 and covering 37 African countries. Sub-Saharan. Our main results through the PVAR (X) reveal that in the absence of institutional variables, public health expenditure has a negative and significant effect on the infant mortality rate, whereas, in the presence of the various institutional variables, this effect is still negative but is no longer significant. Our results show that the presence of institutions halves the weight of public health expenditure in explaining the infant mortality rate. In addition, our results show through the PSTR that there is a certain level of institutional qualities that these countries must achieve for public health expenditure to positively affect infant mortality rates. These thresholds oscillate for all the institutional variables around 7%. Taking institutional variables into account will help reduce infant mortality in Sub-Saharan African countries.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eni Indrayani ◽  
Y Yamoto ◽  
Eti Sulastri

The government’s efforts to r Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) and the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) in Indonesia in reality still far away from the expected target, so as to accelerate the decline in maternal and infant mortality is to implement planning and prevention of complications of childbirth (P4K) through the installation of childbirth stickers on all pregnants house because it is expected to find a best way to save the pregnants, childbirth, post partum, and newborn babyThis aim of this study is to determine how the implementation of mounting stickers and Prevention Program Planning Maternity Complications (P4K) in the Work Area Public Health Center of Buluspesantren II Kebumen in 2013.This research uses descriptive method with a sampling of the total sampling.Analysis of data using univariate data analysis. It is descriptive statistical techniques. Based on research conducted, P4K stickers implementation is not good, as many as 75 respondents (76, 5%) good implementation P4K stickers, showed that all respondents, amounting to 98 pregnant women (100%) have a good level of knowledge, a majority of 23 respondents (23.5%), all respondents (98 pregnant) do not experience obstacles in the implementation of the sticker P4K Keywords: Pregnant, Knowledge, P4K Sticker


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 90 (6) ◽  
pp. 835-845
Author(s):  
Myron E. Wegman

Between 1990 and 1991, provisional data show that the infant mortality rate decreased again, from 9.1 to 8.9, a decline of 2% in contrast to the 7% decline from 1989 to 1990. Birth, death, and marriage rates were also lower, but the divorce rate stayed at about the same level as in 1990. Natural increase in the population, excess of births over deaths, was less than 2 million, 4% less than the increase in 1990. Detailed analysis of changes and of the influence of factors like age and race requires final data; at the time of preparation of this report final birth and death data were available only through 1989. For a variety of reasons, including staff shortages and delays in receipt of state data by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), final data for 1990, which would usually have been available in late August 1992, are not expected before early 1993. Unlike recent years, the decline in the infant mortality rate was only in the neonatal component, which decreased 3.6%. Postneonatal mortality increased, for the first time in many years, by 1.6%, suggesting that the decline in the total is related more to therapeutic advances in neonatology than to improved prevention. Internationally, newly independent Latvia was added to the list of countries with rates less than 15, but Costa Rica was deleted. With the reunification of Germany the list shrank to 28 and, by default, the United States moved up from 21st to 20th. Some 12.5 million births, less than 9% of the world total, took place in countries with under-5 mortality rates of less than 20 per 1000. At the other end of the scale, 42% of the world's births occurred in countries with under-5 mortality rates of more than 140 per 1000. The median under-5 mortality rate for those countries in 1990 was 189 per 1000, meaning that almost 20% of the infants born alive in these countries died before their fifth birthday.


Author(s):  
Funda Kara ◽  
İrfan Ersin

There is a positive relationship between the health level of the society and its economic development. The main reason is that improving quality of the lives and increasing lifetime has lead to higher economic performance. This evaluates the relationship between health expenditure and infant mortality rate in OECD countries. In the analysis process, 20 different countries in the OECD are selected and annual data of these countries for the years between 1980 and 2017 is evaluated with the help of Kao panel cointegration and Dumitrescu-Hurlin causality analysis. The findings show that there is long term relationship between health expenditure and infant mortality rates in OECD countries. Another important conclusion is that there is a causality analysis from health expenditure to the infant mortality rate. While considering these results, it is recommended that OECD countries should take some actions in order to increase health expenditure so that it can be possible to decrease infant mortality rate.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-450
Author(s):  
Chor Foon Tang

Understanding the factors associated with the infant mortality rate is essential as it may guide policymaking in efforts to alleviate the high incidence of infant mortality. The aim of this study is to explore the major determinants of the infant mortality rate with specific focus accorded to research and development (R&D) and governance quality. Our analysis utilizes unbalanced panel data from 122 countries from 2001 to 2013. Using the dynamic panel data generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, we find that income, health spending, female education, technological progress and governance quality have significant negative impact on infant mortality rates. It can thus be surmised that policies to reduce infant mortality rates should focus upon improving the level of income, female education, health spending and governance quality, besides encouraging R&D activities.


1973 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 433-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. J. McCutcheon

In England and Wales prior to 1956 annual estimates for the infant mortality rate q0 were obtained as the quotient of an observed number of deaths and an exposure calculated by reference to the related births. Since 1956, however, infant mortality rates have been measured as the ratio of the numbers of deaths and births in a given calendar year (cf. reference 4, Part I, supplement to Table 24).


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARGARET PELLING

ABSTRACTJohn Graunt's pioneering study,Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality (1662)has been overlooked as a source for ideas about the importance of child mortality in an urban environment. Graunt seems to have been the first to arrive at an infant mortality rate (IMR), but this has been little explored. Graunt helped to define ‘the urban penalty’, but not in terms of the IMR. The article explains Graunt's focus on other aspects of urban mortality in relation to his need to reassure those in government, his methodology, and above all his gender. For context, the article looks at attitudes to childhood among members of the influential Hartlib circle of reformers, with which Graunt was connected. These male writers were greatly concerned about children, but seem to have shared with Graunt the traditional idea that children under the age of about seven were the responsibility of women.


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