Childhood, infant and perinatal mortality, 1996; social and biological factors in deaths of children aged under 3.

This article comments on statistics recently published by ONS relating to infant and childhood mortality in 1996. Several factors--birthweight, mother's age, marital status of parents, father's social class, mother's country of birth, multiple birth status, and sex--are known to be associated with the risk of mortality in infants under one year of age. For the first time, ONS is now able to analyse the deaths of 1 and 2 year-old children according to these same factors. The results indicate that these factors are also associated with mortality rates in these older children.