A disturbing secret is hidden in the U.S. infant mortality rate

Hiding in plain sight

Many years ago a friend of mine lost a newborn to SIDS. I’ll spare you the details — as you can imagine, it was heart wrenching.

After seeing the emotional toll that experience took on my friend, it’s hard for me to fathom the depth of pain hidden in the cold, hard statistics of infant mortality rates.

IMR is the number of deaths of children less than one year old, per 1,000 live births. And any individual country’s IMR is generally regarded as a sort of snapshot of that country’s overall health conditions.

So how can a country like the U.S., with such an advanced level of health care, place 34th on the worldwide IMR list?

Our IMR is actually worse than Cuba, Brunei, and Croatia! It’s baffling.

Or…maybe it’s not.

Tough schedule

If your doctor suggested you get more than two dozen doses of vaccines next year, you might wonder if all those different medications, given in a relatively short period of time, might have some negative effects.

And yet, this is what we do to millions of newborns every year.

The U.S. immunization schedule calls for 26 vaccine doses in the first year of life — more than any other country in the world. So a team of independent researchers wondered how all the countries in the top 34 of the IMR list would compare in number of vaccines required for infants.

In an issue of Human & Experimental Toxicology published earlier this year, the researchers found “a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rates.”

Yeah, THAT’S sort of a red flag!

But don’t think this is leading to an anti-vaccine rant. An excessive load of first-year vaccines seems like a risky way to welcome an infant into the world, but we can’t jump to the conclusion that this huge set of vaccines is the actual cause of infant deaths.

Here’s what strikes me as much more likely: All those vaccines represent a “symptom” of a culture with a too-much-is-never-enough attitude toward synthetic drugs.

Just imagine, for instance, how many women discover they’re pregnant while taking a variety of drugs — everything from acetaminophen for headaches, to a daily antacid, a statin, an antidepressant, an NSAID for joint pain, etc. In those cases, every fetus starts off in an environment awash in pharmaceuticals.

In addition, the excessive use of Pitocin (the synthetic hormone that hurries labor) might play a role. Many fetuses share a dose of anesthesia with their mothers during the labor. And artificial measures to boost fertility could also come into play.

It seems quite possible that all these factors, combined with a massive vaccine load, are just too much for some infants to bear.

And if that’s the case, then the deplorable IMR of the U.S. might be the RESULT of our advanced health care, not in spite of it. Because that “advanced” World Class Modern Medicine status comes with a promise that each new drug and vaccine provides wonderful benefits that only make us better, not worse.

But as we’ve seen again and again, that promise is often little more than wishful thinking — fingers crossed!

This simple study points the way to much-needed research. We owe it to every infant and every parent to follow that thread, because there’s no excuse for a 3rd World level of IMR in the U.S.

Sources: 
“Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?” Human & Experimental Toxicology, Vol. 30, No. 9, September 2011, het.sagepub.com