Friday 2 July 2010

USA = Bad Place to Give Birth?

From the Hartford Wellness Examiner web page:

"With the amount of attention being given to health care reform these days it may shock many of you to learn that the number of women who die while giving birth in this country has continued to rise. According to reports published in the English medical journal The Lancet, "women giving birth in the United States die at more than four times the rate of those in Italy and twice as many as in Britain."

I was surprised when I came across virtually the same statistic in an article in the Plus web magazine from the UK. The article introduced me to a new measurement, the micromort. A one in a million death risk. A nice explanation/comparison came with it. A micromort is the probability of death in a strange game of "Russian roulette" in which the player throws 20 coins into the air and is executed if all twenty land heads.
They have several animated graphs there including this one. Write down your guesses for each before you go and check... what is the safest way to travel?.


And here is the one that started me off on this search:

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