Cuba registers in 2021 an infant mortality rate of 7.6 per 1,000 live births    

Edited by Jorge Ruiz Miyares
2022-01-03 09:29:51

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Havana, January 3 (RHC)-- Preserving the well-being of all pregnant women, postpartum women, and infants in the country has been a priority maintained for decades by the Cuban State and its National Health System through the Maternal and Infant Care Program (PAMI), a program to which our professionals devoted themselves in the year 2021 to snatch every life from SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The contagious virus imposed a complex epidemiological scenario in the year that ended, with an accelerated increase in the number of patients, which also impacted these population groups considered to be at high risk.

In 2020, when the pathogen was still unknown, 103 pregnant women and 17 postpartum women were treated, and no maternal deaths were reported; while in 2021, 6,947 pregnant women and postpartum women were diagnosed with the disease, and 93 of them died from associated complications, representing a 98.7% survival rate.

The changes in these women's infection pattern were due to the entry into the national territory of SARS-CoV-2 variants with a higher viral load. From February and March last year, with the circulation of the Beta variant (reported for the first time in South Africa), the characteristics of the disease began to change.

More than 70% of pregnant women began to show symptoms - they were mostly asymptomatic before - and also presented severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, said Dr. Danilo Nápoles Méndez, Head of the National Group of Gynecology and Obstetrics of the Ministry of Public Health.

As a result of the Delta variant (isolated in India), the evolution became even more unfavorable, with a notable increase in the number of positive pregnant women who moved to critical condition, for which it was necessary to ventilate them and interrupt their pregnancies. In some cases, it was not possible to save their lives despite the efforts.

The months of July, August, and September showed the highest peaks of infections in pregnant women and deaths: 22 in July, 39 in August, 18 in September, and eight in October, when mortality stopped, primarily due to the incidence of vaccination.

As for the pediatric population, there was an increase in the number of children who became ill, from 1,308 positive patients in 2020 to 176,708 in 2021, of whom 11,692 were under one year of age, and 18 deaths occurred as a result of COVID-19, associated with other diseases that aggravated their prognosis, which represents a survival rate of 99.9% in this population group.

At the end of 2021, the infant and maternal mortality indicators that for years have distinguished the work of PAMI, with figures only comparable to those of developed countries, were not as expected, although "they do reflect the efforts of doctors, nurses and the rest of the health workers in an extremely complex epidemiological scenario that forced the reorganization of services and the optimization of resources", said José Angel Portal Miranda, Minister of Public Health, in recent days.

"We have maintained an infant mortality rate below five per thousand live births in recent years, and this was the goal proposed for the last two years. Not meeting it hurts us because of the sensitivity that our children imply," he said.

At the end of 2021, MINSAP's Directorate of Medical Records and Statistics reports, as preliminary data, that 99,093 live births were born on the island, 5,945 fewer than the previous year, and the nation recorded an infant mortality rate of 7.6 per 1,000 live births.



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