Abstract
In Reply.— We thank Dr Sepkowitz for his perceptive comments on the bias that may have occurred in our neonatal mortality calculations because we excluded infants with unknown birth weight or gestational age. As he points out, the incidence of missing data on birth weight, gestational age, or both is highest among low-birth-weight, premature babies, who are at high risk of neonatal mortality. Furthermore, these infants with unrecorded data appear to be at even higher risk of mortality than other infants of the same weight or gestational age. Had we been able to include these infants in our neonatal mortality calculations, Dr Sepkowitz suggests that the true mortality rates would have been higher than those we reported, especially in the low-birth-weight, low-gestational-age cells. He further suggests that because of different rates of missing data for whites and blacks, the differences we noted between white and black mortality could have been
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