Brasília – Child mortality in Brazil decreased from 100 to 23.3 deaths per 1000 live births between 1970 and 2008. The data were taken from the Complete Table of Mortality survey, issued today (1st) by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and published in the Official Gazette.
In the last decade alone, the mortality rate was 30%. During the ten-year period, the country managed to prevent 205,000 children under 1 year of age from dying. If the rate of mortality had remained constant since 1998, Brazil would have recorded, in an 11-year period, 1,261,570 deaths of children under 1 year old, instead of the 1,055,816 deaths recorded.
The mortality rate in Brazil is now further apart from those of countries such as Afghanistan (157,000 deaths per 1,000 live births), Angola (117,500 per 1,000) and Sierra Leone (104,300 per 1,000). The Brazilian rate, however, is still much higher than those of Iceland (2,900 per 1,000), Singapore (3 per 1,000), Japan (3.2 per 1,000), Sweden (3.1 per 1,000) and Norway (3.5 per 1,000).
The survey also shows that, from 1998 to 2008, 68 young men aged 15 to 24 died each day in the country from external causes (traffic accidents, homicides and suicides), totalling 272,500 deaths.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
