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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

The article leads the reader directly to just one possible cause, but lacks a wider point of view and control groups are missing.

To start I miss the totals here to understand better the problem. This is red flag. There are hundreds of adults killed by pollution in the same area for example, accounting for about 4-5% of the total deceases each year. Could be this related?. How many babies were born by year in the hospital?

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I think you’re missing the wider context here. Problems at these hospitals’ maternity departments have been under investigation for years at this point, and the scope of the inquiry has been widened several times in the process. The link is to a UK newspaper, and the context is very well known in the UK at this point and wouldn’t be repeated in every article.

Some background: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-shropshire-46206917

Pollution doesn’t cause babies to die from medical neglect during labour.

Maybe, but pollution has been linked with increase of several troubles in the childbirth, like low weight or premature births.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21112090/

Is well known that preterm babies have an increased risk of dying and show damage in the nervous system later.

So, how many of those 300 babies were also preterm or low weight? We don't know. We lack of the necessary info here to evaluate the problem.

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