As if there isn't enough parents like me have to worry about (flat heads, SIDS, table corners, Hand Foot & Mouth disease, Limited Too!) now they throw in the possibility that my infant daughter could have a stroke at any time. AP came out with a story today called "Thousands of Babies Have Strokes Annually" which of course got picked up on just about every news outlet, and I'm sure it’ll even make the local news tonight. You know with one of those "Tagline" 2 second attention-getter teasers before LOST saying something like "your baby have a stroke..? Experts say YES. Watch tonight at 11 or it could happen to your baby TONIGHT and it'll be all your fault!” OK, so I read the article and it estimates between 1,000 infants, and maybe 3-5,000 1-month to 18 years olds (which is quite a spread). So I did what everybody should do, looked it up to see how accurate this is. So how many babies are born and what are the chances of this happening? A very conservative estimate I found was a ".1%" chance out of 3,915,000 babies alone. The percentage is much smaller for 1-month to 18 year olds ".007%". But that doesn't sound nearly as dramatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment