What are the chances?

A team from Cardiff University assesses the state of learning on the association between social inequality and infant health, covering adverse birth events, low birth weight, premature birth, stillbirth, neonatal mortality and post-neonatal mortality.  In all of these categories, there is a clear association between deprivation and poor outcomes: only failure to thrive shows no evidence of association.  Latest ONS (Office for National Statistics) figures on births and deaths in England and Wales show a small rise in stillbirths, along with a rising fertility rate and a continuance of the trend of rising average age of mothers, now at 29.7 years.  Age-standardised mortality rates in 2011 were the lowest ever recorded for England and Wales, at 6,172 deaths per million population for males and 4,402 deaths per million population for females.  More detail in infant mortality (this time for 2009) is also provided by ONS in the Birth Cohort Tables.  This release caught the media's attention, particularly as regards the higher early death risk in multiple births ("twins are five times more likely to  die before their first birthday").  NHS Choices Behind the Headlines site separates the data from the terror and also puts some more alarming figures under the spotlight.  The ONS analysis also shows that mothers aged under 20 have the highest infant mortality rate for both single and multiple births and that the infant mortality rate for mothers born outside of the UK was greater than for UK born mothers.  Meanwhile, first data from the 2011 census shows the largest ever population for England and Wales at 56.1 million;  an animated data visualisation maps the changes over the past century.