A few days ago, I came across this photo of T-shirt, the print reads:

Why is the USA ranked 46th in the world for infant mortality?

I don’t know how many countries this world currently have, country still pops out of nowhere these days. I would guess the number is around 150, I am sure that number is very inaccurate. Anyway, rank 46 doesn’t look like the USA is anywhere to be the best over the world, but that’s not the shock I felt when I read more about infant mortality.

The top 1 country in lowest mortality rate is Monaco at 1.80 by CIA Factbook 2012 estimation. The definition of infant mortality rate is

The number of deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 live births.

1.80 means, generally speaking, for every 1,000 families, which just have a new baby, near 2 families would have lost a baby. That is 4 heart broken parents. 1.80 is only for deaths under 1 years old, UN has statistics for deaths under 5 years old, and those only counts with live births. More may die during the delivery, even more before the labor.

If this didn’t sink your heart a bit, Afghanistan has 121.63 rate, more than one out of ten families which have a new family member would suffer an infant loss this year. Before I saw that tee-shirt, I had never thought about the death rate of new born babies. To be honest, I really thought the rate was around one in a million, or something even lower.

Just to see more statistics, I downloaded CIA Factbook data, so I could make a spreadsheet, you can see the United Nations’ data. The following chart contains data of the entire world from CIA Factbook.

You can view the spreadsheet or files. I believe the data is in Public Domain, I didn’t see any note from the download page.

It’s hard for me to believe that these days, everything seems changed a lot, even we have much better improvement on health, we still have such high death rate of infant. However, if you look at UN’s data which dated back to 1950s, that was a horrible time.

Coincidentally, I happened to watch Ewan McGregor: Cold Chain Mission [UNICEF], in which he was on a mission to deliver vaccines to extremely remote area for children. The supply of vaccine is heavily rely on cold chain. If there were no such cold chain mission, the infant mortality rate would be even higher, those children live in an environment much worse than ours—those who can use the Internet and read this post, where has access to medical attention.

In the 2012 estimation, India has the rate of 46.07 and 43.13 for Nepal, the two countries which McGregor delivers the vaccines to. You can see the UN health workers set up a roadside station, stopping passing mothers with infants, checking if the infants has already taken vaccines by seeing the markers on the nails; or just going into a flock of people, checking every children.

McGregor only had to go through once, many of the vaccine delivers probably have to regularly go through things like landing on a airstrip which basically is a hand-crafted flat runway on a slope of mountain. McGregor says

Only a handful of pilots in the country [Nepal] are qualified to land here [Kathmandu].

A few days earlier, a passenger plane blew out its tires and crashed.

If you see what that airstrip looks like and the tires do not blow out, you may wonder. The landing is like smash a rock on a bigger stone, that’s as hard as you can get from landing. If the pilot can’t land or take off before the end of runway, then it’s gonna crash and probably fall off along the slope.

I don’t particularly like United Nations (UN), but UNICEF is one of UN system which really does things out of humanity, and UNESCO as well. I have more faith in organizations like UNICEF or other non-profit organizations than in government departments. It’s not like people work with government do not have good hearts, just they are bound with badly formed or outdated laws and rules and regulations, which hardly can be changed or improved.