Brasília - Brazil's infant mortality rate is the third highest in South America, according to the report, "World Situation of Childhood, 2005 - Childhood in Jeopardy," released yesterday (9) by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). For every thousand live births in the country in 2003, 33 infants died before their first birthday. Compared with the rest of South America, Brazil's situation is worse than all its neighbors except Guyana and Bolivia, in which the infant mortality rates per 1000 live births are 52 and 53, respectively.

The report also mentions more recent figures issued by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which calculated an infant mortality rate of 27.5 deaths per 1000 live births. UNICEF considers these figures very high for a country like Brazil, despite the reductions achieved in the infant mortality rate in the past two decades. In 1980, for example, nearly 290 thousand children died prior to completing their first year.

If the number of deaths of children under the age of five is used, Brazil's infant mortality rate amounts to 35 deaths per 1000 live births, placing Brazil 90th in the world ranking. Other countries on this list with higher rankings than Brazil include Vietnam, where the infant mortality rate is 23 deaths per 1000 live births, and Mexico, with 28 deaths per 1000 live births.

The report points to the problems that make Brazilian children more vulnerable to infant mortality. Boys and girls who live in low-income families are twice as likely not to survive their first year as those who come from families with higher incomes. The mother's educational level is another significant factor: Children whose mothers studied for three years or less are twice as likely to die before their first birthday as children whose mothers had eight years or more of schooling.

According to the UNICEF representative in Brazil, Marie Pierre Poirier, infant mortality is also related to lack of access to basic sanitation and potable water. "The children of poor families don't have the same access to potable water as children from rich families. 35% of poor families don't have access to potable water, while only 0.5% of the wealthier families have this problem," Poirier emphasized. With regard to sanitation, she pointed out that 64% of the poor population have no access to sewage treatment, a problem that affects only 8.4% of the wealthier population.

Agência Brasil
Reporter: Juliana Andrade
Translator: David Silberstein
12/10/2004