(Trinidad Express) More babies are dying in Trinidad and Tobago despite this country’s economic progress and prosperity, according to statistics provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).
Unicef’s representative for the Eastern Caribbean, Khin Sandi Lwin, in an exclusive interview with the Express at the Carlton Savannah hotel in Cascade, on Thursday, said this country needed to determine why babies were dying more than they were some five decades ago.
Unicef, she said, supported the University of the West Indies (UWI) to prepare a situation analysis of children and women in Trinidad and Tobago and the findings of that document confirmed what Unicef had known for a while—that infant and child mortality rates in this country have not improved.
Lwin pointed the Express to a graph in the UWI document which shows that the infant death rate per 1,000 live births was approximately 13 up to 2009.
Noting that data provided by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) on infant mortality rates was not up to date, Lwin pointed to the findings of the Child Mortality Estimates Info (CMO Info)—which is a database containing the latest child mortality estimates based on the research of the UN Inter Agency Group for Child Mortality estimation.
These figures show that Trinidad and Tobago is lagging behind other Caribbean islands with respect to its reduction in child mortality rates.
