Temporary behaviour of child mortality in Ciego de Avila during the 2000-2014 period
Abstract
Introduction: infant mortality is an international quality of life indicator that fully reflects a country's socio-economic landscape; it measures both care during pregnancy and childbirth as well as care for the child, their interrelation with the environment and the degree of socioeconomic and cultural development of the community.
Objective: to characterize the temporal behavior of infant mortality, according to selected variables, in the province of Ciego de Avila in 2000-2014.
Method: an observational ecological descriptive study of temporal series was carried out, whose universe of study covered all children under one year of age deceased and all live births in 2000-2014; this last figure was used to calculate the special rates of infant mortality.
Results: in general, there is a tendency in the province to decrease infant mortality. The annual correlogram showed a variety behavior with statistical significance in all its delays, suggesting a periodic cyclical behavior of the series; the highest oscillation identified in the periodogram was in the frequency of 0,5000, which corresponds to a period of two years, which means that every two years there is an increase in the infant mortality rate of the province.
Conclusions: with the exception of Baraguá municipality, in the rest of the province there is a steady trend or towards the reduction of infant mortality; the cyclical behavior of the indicator, with increments every two years, did not allow to corroborate the existence of seasonality in the series studied.