Infant Mortality

Introduction

Infant mortality is one of the most depressing issues around the world. Even though, with development in science and technology, sharp decline has been seen in the infant mortality rates, the issue still serves to be source of depression for countless families around the world. It serves as the most sensitive indicator of the socio economic conditions of the country, nation or community. This document explores dimensions of infant mortality by reviewing some scholarly journals which have explored this issue through practical and legitimate means.

Discussion

Socioeconomic Determinants of Infant Mortality

The article “Socioeconomic Determinants of Infant Mortality in Kenya: Analysis of Kenya DHS 2003” by Hisham Elmahdi Mustafa and Clifford Odimegwu, is taken from The Journal Of Humanities And Social Sciences published in 2004.

Objective of the Study

The article talks about the research which was conducted in Kenya regarding the socio-economical factors of infant mortality. The intent behind this research was to analyze and assess the comparative significance of primary bio-social, demographic and economic variables related to infant mortality in Kenya. Amongst the Millennium Development Goals is the elimination of infant and child mortality by 2/3rd by 2015 (Mustafa and Odimegwu, 2008). In an effort to accomplish that objective, initiatives are focused at determining and searching for economical approaches simply because a lot of international organizations have recommended for more resources to be aimed to healthcare industry.

An intelligent way of accomplishing this is to determine and rank-order the significance of the socioeconomic elements that have an effect on infant mortality. This can help in prioritizing the variables that must be managed for powerful health care interventions in the midst of aggressive scarce resources. This is what this article is basically focused on.

Methodological Approach and Findings

The research is an analytical cross-sectional design through the use of secondary data evaluation of the 2003 Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey (K.D.H.S) data set for young children and infants. Number of logistic regression models was fixed to pick out the major variables influencing infant mortality in both, rural and urban areas. The significance of the

Magnitude for every picked factor was analyzed and verified making use of the Wald's evaluation technique, and consequently the variables were rank ordered based on their over-all P value. The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey of 2003 was basically a nationally representative probability sample survey that consisted of ten thousand house-holds using a sampling design comprising of two stages. In the 1st stage four hundred dousholde (271 from rural and 129 from urban) were selected (Mustafa and Odimegwu, 2008). The women with age 15-59 were considered eligible for the interview. Out of 8717 eligible females, 8195 were interviewed successively with a response rate of 94 percent(Mustafa and Odimegwu, 2008).

Although infant mortality rate in 2002 was 79.6 per thousand, its major determinants are breast-feeding, ethnicity and gender of the baby whereas birth order and pregnancy-intervals are considerable factors in the non-urban location s(Mustafa and Odimegwu, 2008). Emphasis of interventions in children health with the intention to attaining the ...