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To: Brumar89 who wrote (443849)	9/1/2011 8:54:02 AM
From: TideGlider	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Every year the WHO puts out its misleading statistics about infant mortality, and every year the MSM parrots their false message that infant mortality in the US is higher than in countries with socialized medicine schemes. As always, you should be suspicious about statisitcs that don't make sense. Here are just a few of the dodges used by other countries to keep their infant mortality numbers low. http://www.americanthinker.com August 31, 2011 Infant mortality figures for US are misleading Rick Moran According to a new study on infant mortality worldwide, the US ranked 41 out of 45 industrialized nations. In a 20 year analysis of newborn death rates around the world, the study published in PLoS Medicine revealed the number of infants who die before they are 4 weeks old account for 41% of child deaths worldwide. Newborn deaths in the United States ranked 41 out of 45 among industrialized countries, on par with Qatar and Croatia. America's low ranking among modern nations may come as surprise to many who regard the U.S. health care system as the best in the world. Researchers say preterm delivery (delivering before 37 weeks) plays a role in the United State's lower ranking. "Prenatal care is not all created equal. There are areas of the United States where access to prenatal and preventive care is a real problem. It puts the mother at a disadvantage and contributes to premature births and death rate," says the study's author Dr. Joy Lawn of the non-government organization Save the Children. The study says the leading causes of newborn death worldwide are preterm delivery, asphyxia and severe infections. More than a half million babies in the United States-1 in every 8-are born premature each year. This is a misleading statistic as Dr. Linda Halderman explains: Low birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth" statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates. According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing <500g is not considered a living child. But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies - considered "unsalvageable" outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive - is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics. [...] Some of the countries reporting infant mortality rates lower than the U.S. classify babies as "stillborn" if they survive less than 24 hours whether or not such babies breathe, move, or have a beating heart at birth. Forty percent of all infant deaths occur in the first 24 hours of life. In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth (take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered alive. If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates. [...] Too short to count? In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby born who is less than 30 centimeters long is not counted as a live birth. Therefore, unlike in the U.S., such high-risk infants cannot affect Swiss infant mortality rates. Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States. Because we don't have socialized medicine - yet - heroic efforts to save newborns are common in America while these same infants are considered "unsalvageable" in other countries and not counted against their mortality statistics. Even if the counting methods were uniform, we'd still be lower than many countries. This is preventable through education of young mothers who invariably fail to get available pre-natal care. That, and making an attempt to address the epidemic of babies having babies would go a long way to lowering the infant mortality rate.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (443849)	9/2/2011 8:56:47 PM
From: FJB	Respond to of 793917

WikiLeaks reveals all, media groups criticize move Sep 2, 1:03 PM (ET) LONDON (AP) - WikiLeaks disclosed its entire archive of U.S. State Department cables Friday, much if not all of it uncensored - a move that drew stinging condemnation from major newspapers which in the past collaborated with the anti-secrecy group's efforts to expose corruption and double-dealing. Many media outlets, including The Associated Press, previously had access to all or part of the uncensored tome. But WikiLeaks' decision to post the 251,287 cables on its website makes potentially sensitive diplomatic sources available to anyone, anywhere at the stroke of a key. American officials have warned that the disclosures could jeopardize vulnerable people such as opposition figures or human rights campaigners. A joint statement published on the Guardian's website said that the British publication and its international counterparts - The New York Times, France's Le Monde, Germany's Der Spiegel and Spain's El Pais - "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted State Department cables, which may put sources at risk." Previously, international media outlets - and WikiLeaks itself - had redacted the names of potentially vulnerable sources, although the standard has varied and some experts warned that even people whose names had been kept out of the cables were still at risk. But now many, and possibly even all, of the cables posted to the WikiLeaks website carried unredacted names. There's a debate over what kind of an impact that will have. In an interview with the AP earlier this week, former U.S. State Department official P.J. Crowley warned that the new release could be used to intimidate activists in authoritarian countries. Crowley said "any autocratic security service worth its salt" probably already would have the complete unredacted archive of cables, but that the fresh releases mean that any intelligence agency that did not "will have it in short order." WikiLeaks staff members have not returned repeated requests for comment sent in the past two days. But in a series of messages on Twitter, the group suggested that it had no choice but to publish the archive because copies of the document were already circulating online following a security breach. WikiLeaks has blamed the Guardian for the blunder, pointing out that a sensitive password used to decrypt the files was published in a book put out by David Leigh, one of the paper's investigative reporters and a collaborator-turned-critic of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the Guardian, Leigh and others have rejected the claim. Although the password was in fact published in Leigh's book about seven months ago, Guardian journalists have suggested that the real problem was that WikiLeaks posted the encrypted file to the Web by accident and that Assange never bothered to change the password needed to unlock it. In their statement, the Guardian's international partners lined up to slam the 40-year-old former computer hacker. "We cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data - indeed, we are united in condemning it," the statement read. It added: "The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone." The media organizations' rejection is a further blow to WikiLeaks, whose site is under financial embargo and whose leader remains under virtual house arrest in an English country mansion pending extradition proceedings to Sweden on unrelated sexual assault allegations. It's also a sign of the borderless online whistleblower's increasing estrangement from traditional media outlets. Assange and his supporters have long feuded with the Guardian and The New York Times, and in a recent statement the group noted that other Western media organizations had "slowed their rate of publishing" stories derived from the cables. As a result, the anti-secrecy site said it would increasingly turn to "crowdsourcing" - that is, relying on Internet users to sift through its leaked documents and flag important material. It's a relatively new tactic for the group, which has in the past relied on mainstream partners to organize and promote its spectacular leaks of classified information - including hundreds of thousands of U.S. intelligence documents detailing the course of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks says the process is working, pointing to one document flagged by Twitter users who've already begun perusing the newly released files. The cable, filed in 2006, carries an explosive allegation that U.S. forces entered a house during a 2006 raid in Iraq, handcuffed 10 members of the same family and executed them. Although the U.N. letter in which the allegation was made was five years old, its publication put new pressure on the already strained negotiations over keeping U.S. forces in Iraq. Iraq's government said Friday that it is investigating, and some officials said the document is reason enough for the country to force the American military to leave instead of signing a deal allowing troops to stay beyond a year-end departure deadline. "Crowdsourcing has proved to be a success," WikiLeaks said. But amid the controversy over the unredacted cables, some supporters are keeping their distance. The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders said Thursday that it had temporarily suspended its WikiLeaks "mirror site." Such sites act as carbon-copies of their originals, relieving pressure due to heavy traffic and preserving data in case of attack. In a statement, Reporters said it had "neither the technical, human or financial resources to check each cable" for information that could harm innocent people and thus "has to play safe."