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South Korea's National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) has not released a chart showing an increasing rate of babies born with birth defects -- which purportedly reached as high as 21 percent in 2020. The chart repeatedly shared online makes erroneous calculations based on insurance claims data and shows inflated figures not calculated by the NHIS, a spokesperson for the agency told AFP. A medical professor separately told AFP the purported rates of birth defects in the false chart are outlandish, estimating the actual figure to be consistent with global prevalence at around five percent. Alongside a low birth rate, the serious problem of birth defects in South Korea, reads the Korean-language title of a post shared here on Gifsf.com, a South Korean online forum, on November 29. Screenshot of the misleading post shared on Gifsf.com. Captured December 9, 2022. The post features a chart that claims to show the rates of children born with different defects had increased from 2018 to 2020. Korean-language text included below the chart reads: These are statistics from the health ministry that shows the rate of defects per birth in South Korea is increasing every year. The chart says the rate of birth defects was at 16.90% in 2018; 20.17% in 2019 and 21.09% in 2020. The purported rates, however, had been erroneously calculated. The chart has added up the number of birth defects diagnoses filed to the NHIS for 2018 , 2019 and 2020 -- and divided the sum with figures from a separate dataset showing the annual births from South Korea's statistics agency here . The same chart was shared in South Korean internet forum posts here , here and here ; and on Facebook here . A spokesperson for the NHIS told AFP the purported percentages have not been calculated by the NHIS . Misrepresented data A document released alongside the NHIS datasets states the agency's published figures correspond to cases in which health insurance claims were filed by a medical institution after an insurance subscriber received a primary diagnoses for a particular disorder. Summing up these figures and dividing the sum by the number of births in South Korea taken from a separate dataset had exaggerated the resulting percentage, according to the NHIS spokesperson. The same patient may have been diagnosed with multiple defects, which is often the case, the spokesperson told AFP. The datasets also indicate primary diagnoses. At face value, [the datasets] do not tell us whether these patients have been conclusively diagnosed with that disease. The spokesperson further added the NHIS datasets lists patients that were registered as younger than one at the time of their diagnosis and may not have been born on the year they were listed under. But in the chart, these patient numbers are divided by the total number of births that year, which likely further inflated these percentages, the spokesperson said. Birth defect prevalence The NHIS does not keep data estimating actual birth defect rates, the spokesperson added. Professor Leem Jong-han , who teaches occupational and environmental diseases at South Korea's Inha University, told AFP birth defect rates of 16 to 20 percent are outlandish. He said the actual figure is likely around three to five percent -- in line with the findings of a study he co-authored in 2016 . This rate is also consistent with other countries around the world, Leem added. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , about three to six percent of infants worldwide are born with a serious birth defect. The World Health Organization also estimates that around six percent of babies worldwide are born with congenital defects each year, with low- and middle-income countries being disproportionately affected. Studies on birth defect prevalence in different countries, including here and here , also cite similar global figures.
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