History
Traditionally, babies weighing less than a certain amount (which varies between countries) have been classified as having low birth weight. In a given population, low birth weight babies have a significantly higher mortality rate than others; thus, populations with a higher rate of low birth weights typically also have higher rates of child mortality than other populations.
Based on prior research, the children of smoking mothers are more likely to be of low birth weight than children of non-smoking mothers. Thus, by extension the child mortality rate should be higher among children of smoking mothers. So it is a surprising real-world observation that low birth weight babies of smoking mothers have a lower child mortality than low birth weight babies of non-smokers.
Read more about this topic: Low Birth-weight Paradox
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)