INFECTIOUS disease experts from European countries and other developed economies, observing our major public hospitals, cannot seem to fathom why our young are still dying of whooping cough (pertussis) and other respiratory diseases eradicated from their home countries generations ago. A fact of life to us — 50 pertussis deaths from January to May out of the 850 cases reported — is something incomprehensible to them and their societies, where health care for children starts with thoroughly implemented child vaccination and immunization programs.

If these foreign infectious disease experts were to take the next logical step and expand their inquiry into the state of the child health care system here overall, it would lead them to a more tragic discovery. Infant and child mortality is so commonplace in our hamlets of poverty that preventable child deaths no longer merit an expression of either shock or despair.