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Do not let Michael Moore read this story or that fat bastard will never shut up about it. A new comprehensive study on newborn deaths in every country in the world was just published and — gulp — the data shows that kids are less likely to die in their first month in Havana hospitals than in Miami.
This is one study you won’t hear mentioned at Versailles when everyone is poking holes in the “But Cuba has great doctors!” argument.
Granted, both Cuba and the U.S. are in the developed world, where infant mortality is much, much rarer than in the developing world, particularly in Africa.
The study, published in the PLoS Medicine Journal, with data from the World Health Organization, used statistical models to track the rates of children dying in their first 28 days of life in 155 countries around the world.
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Ninety-nine of every 100 kids who die at that age do so in low-income nations, and Nigeria, Pakistan, India, China, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo account for half of the 3.3 million newborns who die annually.
But the study’s results also show that the U.S. is not a leader in the developed world. Forty countries have lower newborn death rates than the States, including Malaysia, Poland, Israel — and Fidel’s socialist paradise.
The study’s authors say Cuba has dramatically improved its infant survival rates, while the U.S. has barely changed in the past decade.
“It’s not that things are worse in the United States than before; it’s that the U.S. isn’t making progress like other countries,” Dr. Joy Lawn, the study’s co-author and a pediatrician with Save the Children, tells the International Business Tribune.
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