mcbride
Posts: 333
Joined: 1/14/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Sanity Does anyone find it strange that all the fine editors and reporters and other assorted self-proclaimed newsmen down at The New York Times failed to dig out that little nugget of truth? It's fairly amazing. One little tazzygirl managed to put the whole lot of 'em to shame. More amazing is that anyone would think that it hadn’t occurred to CDC, WHO, and countless other research organizations, and been taken into account. Of course there are some differences, as QuandO and other right-wing blogs have been noting, in an effort to explain away a serious failure. But there are some glaring problems with pretending that it explains away all, or most, of the startling gap between the US and comparable countries. As others have pointed out, in Canada and the Scandinavian countries, and others, very premature babies with relatively low odds of survival are counted as live births, which produces higher mortality rates compared with other countries that do not register them as live births. And yet… those countries still have better infant mortality rates than the US. If it were true that the US was doing nearly as well as other industrialized countries, but that they measure stillborns differently, you could simply check that. And you can. And guess what? The WHO does that, here. There are some simple charts here. If you separate out and look at all the applicable rates, newborn, and infant, and stillborn, you get trouble. The “statistical illusion” argument falls apart. I wonder if all the fine editors and reporters and other assorted self-proclaimed newsmen down at The New York Times did their homework and figured out, quickly, that it's a little nugget of, well, something other than truth.
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