African-Americans are 2.4 times as likely to die as infants, compared with white newborns. Among white children, the infant-mortality rate rose to 5.73 per 1,000 live births in 2005, compared with 5.66 in the previous year. Overall, the U.S. infant-mortality rate rose to 6.86 per 1,000 in 2005, from 6.78 in 2004, according to the data.
Those slight increases followed years of generally steady declines during the 1990s and the early years of the current decade, especially among white infants. Among Hispanics, infant mortality rates ranged from 4.42 for mothers of Cuban descent to 8.30 for women of Puerto Rican origin, the CDC report said.
In 2005, low birth weight or preterm babies were born more often to non-Hispanic black mothers than to women of other origins. Mothers of Mexican origin had the lowest rates of low-birth-weight babies, and Asian or Pacific Islander mothers had the lowest rates of preterm births (10.7 percent), the report said.
Nearly 44 percent of the infant deaths occur due to congenital malformations, low-birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome. Other factors include more frequent use of fertility treatments, and an increase in the number of women having C-sections and labor induced births before the baby is full term.
