Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, but the country’s economic downward spiral under the rule of President Nicolas Maduro has led to soaring inflation, shortages of food and medicine and a current political standoff between Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaido. The political crisis intensified on Wednesday as Maduro accused U.S. President Donald Trump of ordering his assassination.
Now new research shows deepening health problems for the South American country, including rising infant mortality rates.
Between the 1950s and 2000, Venezuela made some of the most “substantial improvements in infant mortality rates in Latin America,” according to a report published in the medical journal The Lancet Global Health. Yet that progress may be reversed by today’s economic crisis combined with a rise in infectious and parasitic diseases.
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“Around 2009, the long-term decline in infant mortality rate stopped, and a new pattern of increase was observed,” say the authors of the report. “The infant mortality rate reached 21.1 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016, almost 1.4 times the rate of 2008.”
By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Latin American and Caribbean countries is 14.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, according to the World Bank.
According to the new research, the increase in child mortality measured in 2016 took the country back to the levels reported in the late 1990s and prevented the Venezuelan government from reaching the U.N. Millennium Development target of 9 births per 1,000 live births.
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In July, the country faced a measles outbreak at its border with Brazil, when 23 people from a remote Amazon tribe were hospitalized and hundreds were at risk at contracting the disease due to low immunity. At the time, it was unclear how many people were infected since the outbreak happened in an extremely remote location.
On Monday, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, in a series of retaliations against President Nicolas Maduro and in a further attempt to recognize opposition head Juan Guaido as the country’s legitimate leader.
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Infant Deaths Rise in Venezuela, Study Shows originally appeared on usnews.com
