Infant Mortality Rate in Brazil Higher Than in Venezuela, Says Mundi Index

By Arkady Petrov

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With more than 13.4 million unemployed and 26.5 percent of the population living in poverty, Brazil is experiencing one of its worst moments.

The country also has 5.2 million people going hungry and has seen its infant mortality rate rise again after years of decline.

According to Index Mundi, a database that gathers statistics from different sources around the world and presents them in a simplified way, in graphs and tables, the mortality rate of children under one year in Brazil is higher than that of countries like Venezuela and Syria.

The portal uses the CIA World Factbook as the source for this data.

According to the Mundi Index, the mortality rate of children under one-year-old in Brazil in 2017 was 17.5 for every 1,000 live births. In Venezuela, which has faced a serious crisis in recent years, it was 12.2 deaths per 1,000 live births.

The population size of countries does not influence the child mortality rate, which is measured per thousand live births.

According to a study published in the scientific journal Plos Medicine, budget cuts in basic health and social assistance can lead to up to 20 thousand deaths and 124 thousand hospitalizations of children under the age of 5 by 2030 in Brazil.

Deaths that could be prevented by investing in the Family Health Strategy and Bolsa Família programs.

It is worth noting that official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) point to a lower mortality rate in Brazil in 2017: 12.8 deaths of children under one-year-old for a thousand live births.

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