Infant Mortality in South America

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Infant Mortality in South America Sarah Boyt November 22, 2021 George Mason University Math 401 Mathematics and 3D printing My Design Journey: Initially, I wanted to model CDC Covid-19 data. In particular, I wanted to create a map of the United States where the height was represented by the number of cases (or percent vaccinated or something of the sort). However, the Covid-19 data available on Mathematica is time series data. Creating a map was more important to me than modeling Covid-19 data, so I went back to the drawing board. I went through my google docs to look for inspiration in my old projects. I came across a paper I wrote in high school about population aging in Europe. I decided that I would create two maps of Europe using CountryData in Mathematica to illustrate population aging. In the first map, height would represent life expectancy. In the second map, height would represent fertility rate. I successfully made a 3D graphic of fertility rates in Europe; however my computer was unable to download the stl file. Europe has 51 countries; I realized that is too many points for my computer to handle. I decided to create a data visualization of South America because it has only 14 countries and I figured my computer could handle that. I also took AP Spanish in high school and find South America very interesting. However, I couldn't illustrate population aging because the example notebook featured fertility rates in South America. Inspired by the example, I made a map of infant mortality rates. I saw that Mathematica had female infant mortality rates as well. The female mortality rates were higher than the overall infant mortality rates, which I found really sad. I liked the two maps together; my data visualization was complete. Or so I thought. After my print was done, I decided to look into why female infant mortality is higher than overall infant mortality. I assumed that male infant mortality was lower and accounted for the difference. But from my research I learned that male infant mortality is actually higher than female infant in most of the world, including in South America. Armed with this knowledge I made a third map for male infant mortality and printed it. Background and Observations: Infant mortality is the death of children under the age of one. Infant mortality is measured by the infant mortality rate (IMR), the probability of death in the first year of life per 1000 live births. Infant mortality is an important indicator of a community's overall health. High infant mortality is often indicative of poor sanitation, medical care, nutrition and education. When looking at my maps together, one thing that is very striking is that Bolivia has much higher infant mortality rates both overall and within both genders. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America. Additionally, Bolivia has a large indigenous population many of whom live in rural areas with inadequate medical care. These factors account for the high infant mortality in Bolivia. As I mentioned earlier, infant mortality is higher for males. This surprised me. Since males are favored in latinx cultures, I expected that male infant mortality would be lower. In reality, male babies are biologically weaker and more susceptible to infections and conditions associated with prematurity. I don't know why the overall infant mortality fraction is lower than both the female and male infant mortality fractions. Perhaps, since the fractions are small, dividing into subsets makes the fractions larger. However, some countries like Chile have relatively similar fractions for all three groups. On the other hand, in Brazil and Bolivia gender seems to impact infant mortality. Sources: https://www.humanium.org/en/bolivia/ https://www.britannica.com/science/infant-mortality-rate https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23151996/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#Medicine_and_biology