America's Infant-Mortality Puzzle. We rank at or near the bottom of the industrialized world by this indicator. Public Interest, Fall 1991 has a 17 page article by Nicholas Eberstadt on the topic of infant mortality. It contains a lot that is not generally known and not much discussed when the figures on this are compared. Unfortunately the article is not available on line, and I have not seen the information it has on line either.
Most people know to be cautious about comparing numbers between countries.
Unemployment rates for example, are not always gathered the same way. But this caution has been lost in comparisons of infant-mortality numbers. Infant-mortality usually declines with increasing wealth. The first reason the US numbers are so far out of line with what would be expected from the relative wealth of the US, is that the numbers are not collected on the same basis. In Italy, there are 3 different definitions in use in different regions of the country.