A LITTLE BACKGROUND MUSIC. Lead vocalist in a trio of Cleveland rock bands in her teens, Anne Cochran was putting down demos and jingles before making everything official with a degree in Theater and Voice from Case Western Reserve University.
The UNICEF estimates that an average of 353,000 babies are born each day around the world. The crude birth rate is 18.9 births per 1,000 population or 255 births globally per minute or 4.3 births every second (as of Dec. 2013 estimate) Our current world population is approximately 7.2 billion and growing. It passed the 7 billion mark in 2011.
In the UK in recent years, approximately 1 in every 920 babies born has Down syndrome (745 babies in England and Wales and around 840 babies throughout the UK each year). In the USA, approximately 1 in 830 babies are born with Down syndrome (4,700 annually). Across Europe, around 9,000 babies are born with the condition annually. Worldwide, we estimate that 220,000 babies are born every year with Down syndrome. In the UK, the birth rate has risen in recent years: in the five years to 2009, the birth rate was 9% higher and 22% more babies were born than in the previous 5 years. In the US, between 1979 and 2003, live birth prevalence increased by 31%, from 9.0 to 11.8 per 10,000 live births.