From April 7, 1999

We've been talking about the occurrance rate of CDH as compared to spina bifida and cystic fibrosis for years. Especially how low CDH awareness is!!! We've done a ton of research over the years and I was putting some stuff together this weekend for a project and I ran across a bunch of interesting old posts on our lists. I thought I'd post a few of them. Heck, I'll post several over the next few days. If any of you have any neat stats, please feel free to post too!



From April 7, 1999:

-----------------------------------

Re: Boys vs. Girls Theory

LOL, Heidi, now you've got me searching the internet, trying to find the
statistics on boys vs
girls born. I did not know any of the information you posted- learn something
new every day.
: )

This is what I found at www.infoplease.com (love this site, just found it- after
searching an
hour):
In 1996 in the US, 1,990,480 boys and 1,901,014 girls were born (ok, I was wrong
about the boy
to girl ratio- no idea where I came up with that, remember hearing it
somewhere). This info
that I found only includes babies born to White and African American parents (no
idea why it
didn't include other races). Total births for 1996 in the US was 3,891,494. If
we assume
(meaning no one knows for sure) that 1 in every 2500 babies has CDH, this means
that
approximately 1556 babies were born with CDH in 1996 in just these 2 races
alone- 4-5 babies a
day. WOW!!!!

Some CDH occurance trivia facts to think about in comparison to more publicized
devastations
(I'm not discounting any of these tragedies, Lord knows my family falls into
more than one of
these lists, this is just FYI):

-Approx. 1556 babies are born with CDH each year, approx. 775 of these babies do
not survive
(.04% chance of being born with CDH).
-Tornados injure approx. 1500 people each year in the US, 80 don't survive.
-In 1997, 306 people were struck by lightening, 42 didn't survive. (this means
we're 5 times
more likely to have a baby with CDH than to be struck by lightening).
-1n 1996, 37 people in the US were killed by hurricanes.
-118 people were killed by floods in the US in 1997.
-In 1989, 98 people in the US died of Botulism
-In 1996, 508 cases of Measles were reported in the US, 1 person didn't survive.
There were
238 cases of German Measles.
-There were 560 quadruplet births in the US in 1996.


I had a horrible time trying to find world birth statistics. Couldn't find a
thing on the birth
rate or gender rate.

My head is spinning thinking of all the CDH born in the world every day- and
with only 300
families in CHERUBS, so many 1000's of families are going through this alone.

Well, too much brain overload for me tonight. I promise to get all the other
e-mails answered
today (behind, yet again).

Dawn T.