Diego, the fourth baby delivered to a couple who had sought fertility treatments in Costa Rica, passed away in his incubator at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the San Juan de Dios Hospital, a flagship medical center that is part of the national public health care system.

According to a news report filed by journalist Lady Rojas of online news daily Costa Rica Hoy, baby Diego weighed just 988 grams at birth and suffered from an underdeveloped pulmonary system. As previously reported by our partner news agency EFE:

The first sextuplets in the history of Costa Rica – four boys and two girls – were born by Cesarean section at San Jose’s Mexico Hospital, a spokesperson of the medical center said Monday.

 

The sextuplets [were] doing well, though their birth Sunday night was premature [an incomplete period of] gestation, and for that reason they are being protected in incubators with a system of intubation, the spokesperson said.

 

The mother, 34, a resident of Heredia in central Costa Rica, is in good health, while three of the babies are in Mexico Hospital, two are in Hospital de la Mujer and the other is in San Juan de Dios Hospital, according to the protocol established by La Caja, Costa Rica’s public healthcare system.

Diego’s tiny surviving siblings, three boys and two girls, are being closely monitored by more than a dozen health specialists.

According to medical research evaluated by the United States National Institutes of Health, infant mortality, particularly in premature birth conditions, tends to be higher in boys:

Infant mortality is higher in boys than girls in most parts of the world. This has been explained by sex differences in genetic and biological makeup, with boys being biologically weaker and more susceptible to diseases and premature death. At the same time, recent studies have found that numerous preconception or prenatal environmental factors affect the probability of a baby being conceived male or female.

As is many other regions of the world, Costa Rica presents a higher mortality rate for the male gender in general. As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, census statistics in the last few decades indicate that there are more women than men living in our country at any given time, and this is despite the fact that more baby boys are born than baby girls.