Death Rates

THE woman was nine months pregnant and in shock: She had just watched her father and uncle die at a bomber's hands. The baby was coming, but her family was afraid to take her to a hospital, where they might be kidnapped or killed by roving militias. And so, like many Iraqis these days, they turned to an unlicensed midwife. The baby girl was born in Samira Majeed's makeshift delivery room, a chilly, windowless apartment foyer with a sheet of battered linoleum spread across the floor like a rug.

At least 70 Iraqi college students were killed and more than 170 others wounded Tuesday when a pair of car bombs exploded almost simultaneously at a Shiite-dominated university in the capital, apparently the latest salvo in the civil war between Sunni Arab insurgents and Shiite Muslim militants. The first bomb blew up a minivan filled with students leaving Mustansiriya University for the day.

Measles deaths around the world have decreased by 60% since 1999, to fewer than 345,000 last year, in what the head of the World Health Organization called a "historic victory for global public health." Deaths totaled 873,000 in 1999. The decrease resulted from a $300-million Measles Initiative begun in 2001 to cut measles deaths in half.

Blacks still have a much higher death rate from cancer than whites even though U.S. cancer death rates are down overall and among blacks as well, the American Cancer Society said Thursday. It said the cancer death rate in 2003 was 35% higher in black men and 18% higher in black women than in white men and women. The report estimates that 153,000 of the 1.

Five Kaiser Permanente hospitals were among the 28 institutions with the highest death rates in California for patients with pneumonia, according to a state report to be released today. The Kaiser hospitals in Sacramento, South Sacramento, Panorama City, Riverside and Roseville all had higher than average mortality rates between 2002 and 2004, said the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Statewide, 12.

A sharp decline in U.S. breast cancer deaths in 2003 held steady the following year, providing further evidence that the drop is related to the large number of women who stopped hormone replacement therapy, researchers report today. Between 2001 and 2004, the number of breast cancer cases dropped 8.6% overall -- 11.8% among women older than 50, the primary consumers of the hormones, according to the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Infections by a recently discovered virus may be responsible for a significant fraction of stillbirths, Swedish and American researchers reported Thursday in the journal Birth Defects Research. The Ljungan virus is named after the Swedish river valley where virologist Bo Niklasson of Uppsala University discovered it in voles in 1999. The virus is apparently also common in American rodents, said his coauthor, geneticist William Klitz of the Public Health Institute in Oakland.

U.S. infant mortality declined slightly in 2004 to the lowest level on record, but the death rate for babies born to black mothers was more than double that of white mothers' babies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this week. The infant mortality rate, tracking deaths up to age 1, was 6.78 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2004, compared with 6.84 in 2003, the agency said.

Egypt made the most progress among developing countries in reducing deaths of children younger than 5 from 1990 to 2005, while Iraq deteriorated the most, a U.S.-based charity reported Tuesday. Save the Children tracked child mortality trends in 60 developing countries during the 15-year period. Twenty made no progress in reducing deaths or had higher death rates. The 60 countries accounted for 94% of child deaths worldwide, the report says. About 10.

Californians needing a coronary bypass can now, for the first time, look up which surgeons in the state have the best -- and worst -- mortality rates for that operation. A report released Thursday names and rates 302 surgeons who performed heart bypass operations at 121 California hospitals during 2003 and 2004. Prepared by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, the 143-page study is posted on the office's website, www.oshpd.ca.gov.