Consanguinity and its effect on infant and child mortality in Egypt

Rita G. Khayat, University of Notre Dame

This paper examines the effect of consanguineous marriages on infant and child mortality in Egypt using country’s Demographic Health Survey 2000 data - a nationally representative sample of 16957 households from six governorates of Egypt that includes 15573 ever-married women aged 15-49. To see clearly the impact of consanguinity on offspring’s mortality, the group of women has been divided into three separate categories, namely, ‘close consanguineous’, ‘remote consanguineous’ and ‘non-consanguineous’ marriages. Multivariate logistic regression models have been used with ‘infant mortality’ and ‘child mortality’ as dependent variable and controlling for other selected socio-economic variables that are known to affect the dependent variable. The results show 30% and 19% higher risk of infant mortality among close and remote consanguineous couples, respectively. Similarly, the risk of child mortality is found higher among the close consanguineous couples by more than 50% and among remote consanguineous couples by 27% as compared to non-consanguineous unions.