Why is child mortality higher in England than Sweden?

The massive differences in child mortality between low and high-income countries are well-known, but differences between similarly wealthy countries are also striking, and inter-country comparisons can tell us much about the causes.

England and Sweden are both prosperous Western European countries with universal social security and healthcare, so one might expect mortality rates to be similar: not so. A major study in The Lancet highlights how badly England is doing compared with Sweden (Zylbersztejn A et al. 2018. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)30670-6). The authors looked at national data for mortality between 2003 and 2012 for children aged 2 days to 4 years (deaths on days 0 and 1 were excluded because of possible discrepancies in live birth vs stillbirth classification). They identified a range of diagnostic and clinical data that were collected universally, and could be meaningfully compared between the two countries.

The raw data are salutatory even before any analysis:...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/2Lmiivg