Infant mortality fell dramatically in two borough neighborhoods where rates have been historically high for years, says new city Health Department statistics. In Fort Greene, infant mortality fell from 7.3 deaths per 1000 births in 2006 to 0.8 deaths in 2007. In Crown Heights North, the rate fell from 9.8 to 4.6. In both neighborhoods, the rates were the lowest they have been in at least five years. Advocates said wealthier people moving into the neighborhoods with access to health care and improved care for poorer women may explain the dramatic drops which also occurred in Flatbush, Brownsville and East New York. Other neighborhoods, including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Coney Island and Park Slope, suffered increased infant mortality.–NYDN
Bklink: Infant Deaths Down in Fort Greene, Crown Heights North
September 5th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Tags: Crown Heights · Fort Greene · Shortlink
1 response so far ↓
1 Brenda from Flatbush // Sep 5, 2008 at 8:32 am
It makes no apparent sense that infant mortality would go up in Park Slope and down in poorer nabes; it also makes little sense that they’d go down in one poor nabe and not another. Blaming gentrification is a mere guess. What’s surprising is that there was no mention of a margin of error in the stats, or of the size of the raw numbers; the smaller the numbers, the less reliable the observed “trend.” The big drop in Fort Greene could be due to random statistical variance–i.e., chance. Epidemiology is supposedly a science, but all the Daily News has provided are a few raw numbers without context–an intriguing base for some (God forbid) actual science reporting.