TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Our Telephonic Primacy

Re: Our Telephonic Primacy

AES (siegman@stanford.edu)
Fri, 25 Mar 2005 20:10:34 -0800

In article <telecom24.131.15@telecom-digest.org>, John Smith
<user@example.net> wrote:

> Dave Garland wrote (about infant mortality in Cuba):

>> It's true, but the US has far more heroic interventions among extremely
>> low birth weight and extremely premature infants than Cuba. Which, of
>> course, are far more likely to die than normal births. I suspect that
>> in Cuba, those get counted as miscarriages, not infants.

> Is this just a guess, or do you have reason to suspect that the
> medical definition of "birth" is different in Cuba? Or perhaps it's
> the definition of "death"? It seems to me, considering an equal
> number of premature births, that heroic intervention should produce a
> benefit in the statistics. If it doesn't, then why do it? Or is
> there a higher percentage of premature births in the U.S.?

Demographics, specifically distribution of ages at which women
conceive and deliver, could be significantly different in the two
societies, and have an impact on the resulting statistics. (But don't
ask me for specifics; I don't know them.)

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