Reported for Statewide by Bill Kelly.

Your mommy just can't wait to see you.
The moment resonates with every parent. A proud father brings Hane Alexander, barely an hour old, back to meet his mom.
Hi, baby. Hi, sweetie. Remember me?
It happens 23,000 times a year in Nebraska. This is a state that prided itself on routinely beating the national averages in bringing healthy babies into the world.
They get sleepy a couple hours after being born. It's hard stuff being born.
Even harder for some babies. In the past few years while the United States continued to make progress in reducing the rate of infant mortality, Nebraska's progress slowed.
I think everybody always just assumed it just didn't happen in Nebraska. We didn't have the patient population that happened to.
This is another way of looking at the same thing.
Dr. Richard Raymond, the State's chief medical officer, wants to know why babies die in Nebraska. He leads a task force formed by the Governor to investigate the infant mortality figures.
[Dr. Richard Raymond] After years and years of progress, we see basically flat with a few spikes, and I don't think we should flatten out yet.
38 People make up the group-- doctors, nurses, child safety advocates, average citizens. Some members still wonder if the State isn't dealing with a statistical glitch. Some came in with assumptions about why the numbers have gone sour. All agree, the State needs to know more.
[Dr. Magna Peck] But the bottom line is the following. Babies who die are babies who from the moment they are conceived through to blowing out their first birthday candle, something terrible goes wrong.
Dr. Magna Peck with the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center wanted to challenge any preconceived notions this group might have about Nebraska's infant mortality statistics.
[Dr. Peck] Raise your hand if you really think it could have been prevented. Put them up high if you're sure. If you're not sure, keep it down.
Peck presented the group with the fictional case of Baby Michael who could have died for so many reasons.
It's multifactorial but the final denominator is the baby had presumably SIDS crib death.
What do you know about Bill, Senator?
Well, Bill was there to create babies but not to tend to them.
[Dr. Peck] So you think that the fact that mom is working, baby died?
Well, economic issues.
If you think the mother had been there, the baby wouldn't have died?
Maybe the mom had the education, the grandmother didn't. Who knows.
Why was the baby born early to begin with at five weeks?
She's 18 and having her second child. This is an adolescent pregnancy.
She was young and she was underweight.
This is two babies to an 18-year-old.
I'm saying I think we're missing opportunities to provide programs before she was pregnant, to her mother and really addressing things on a more global level.
From the very specific medical reasons to the very complex problems of society. After starting with crib death as a medical cause of death, there was little agreement about why this fictional Baby Michael's life ended so early.
We must address the root causes because we can't afford the aftermath...
With so many explanations offered in just one death, the challenge is clear for a commission investigating dozens of deaths annually.
[Dr. Peck] Let me just challenge you that there's not a single answer to this because I don't think the charge of the commission is clear, but you're going to have to wrestle between the immediate things that you can do something about and the stuff that is a whole lot tougher down the long run and define a balance.
It may very well be that we don't have near enough data to make any recommendations whatsoever and the first recommendations will be that we get more data.
Dr. Andrew Robertson believes the answer to this puzzle can be found in the statistics kept by the State and with the numbers this panel will collect specifically for this investigation.
[Dr. Robertson] We're in a business where you hope that everybody is healthy and you want to have a good outcome, and when it doesn't go that way, you always go back and look and try to decide well, was there something that could have been done differently to have prevented this? In some instances, there's a yes there. In some instances, there's maybe. In some instances, I don't know.
At Omaha's Methodist Hospital where Dr. Robertson practices, he and his colleagues have some suspicions. For one, Nebraska has impressive success in reproductive technology, getting women pregnant who faced fertility problems. In addition to moms with single babies, Dr. Robertson delivers dozens of twins and triplets every year, and the number continues to grow. Statistics reveal an increase in the number of children born who are tiny, even dangerously small.
[Dr. Raymond] Families are now able to have children that could not before but there's a risk involved with it. So instead of slacking off, actually sometimes often technology makes things worse.
You have a lot more little tiny babies that have a harder time surviving.
[Dr. Raymond] Exactly. Exactly.
In addition many Nebraska moms-to-be are miles from a major medical center like Omaha or Lincoln. That makes a difference.
[Cecile Graf] We're very blessed in the big city hospitals that we can specialize.
Cecile Graf is a nurse who counsels rural medical professionals and new moms in small towns on the challenges of delivering outside of big city hospitals.
[Cecil Graf] In some rural hospitals nurses and physicians as well have to be able to do everything. They're general practitioners, both the nurses and the physicians. They may have a cardiac patient in the E.R. at the same time they have a new mom delivering and then somebody comes in in premature labor all at the same time. They have one doctor and maybe one nurse in the whole hospital at that particular hour of the day.
Those tiny, high risk babies are more common among teen mothers. Sometimes the mother smokes, abuses drugs or alcohol, or simply ignores some of the rules of basic good nutrition. Nebraska may have to look at how it's educating new mothers even before their pregnancies start.
[Dr. Robertson] You have to step up and look back at it from a State level how much of any one of those things has really contributed a large portion to the mortality rate and what has the State done to try to prevent that. How much effort have they had to put into it to save a certain number of lives? That's where it's going to get difficult.
[Barbara Martin] I'm 27 years old and I have five children. I love all my children and basically my children probably have saved my life.
Barbara Martin got the message about teen pregnancy too late. A message about healthy lifestyles came too late for one child stillborn months premature. With a healthy newborn today, she wants to share a message with other young women.
[Barbara Martin] It was stress-related, not the proper care, not taking care of myself.
That's a hard lesson.
[Martin] Yes, it is. It is. And it's something that I want to give back to another girl.
As a community, as a city, are you saying that we can't do something to keep 25 children from dying a year? I say that we can.
Barbara sits on an advisory panel for Omaha Healthy Start, a coalition of community groups who all want to drive down the infant mortality rate in Omaha's near north side.
Does anyone want to nominate anyone?
Deborah A. Jackson is the chair.
[Deborah A. Jackson] These girls were not being educated. They were not getting the education theirselves. Wanting to have a baby and wanting to have a healthy baby is two different things. Wanting to have a healthy baby starts before you get pregnant.
Using every corner of the community's leadership from doctors to hairstylists, the word will be put out about what it takes to raise a healthy baby.
[Jackson] Nothing like a young girl sitting in the beautician's chair and you got her there and you can preach to her on Healthy Start. Nothing like that. What young girl doesn't like going to get her hair done?
But while the infant mortality rate in Nebraska's minority community is still too high, it's also true that the rate of infant death is going down among Blacks and among Native Americans and in the nebraska's new Hispanic immigrant population. The one segment of the state's population where infant death has been ever so slightly but steadily increasing has been among Caucasian mothers. It was another surprise in the numbers that adds another element to the medical mystery to solve. If that mystery has a solution, it will be found in statistics. Over the next year or two, researchers will be pouring over data to look for clues. Dr. Jill McMullen wades through an entire planet's collection of medical studies on the causes and cures of babies dying.
[Dr. Jill McMullen] Just by doing some simple searches, we have come up with some great resources of people who have already done a lot of this work before and we can go directly to them, we hope, and ask for their help.
She will look for other areas that have shared Nebraska's statistical patterns. She will look for ways other cities and states and countries have measured their successes and failures.
[Dr. McMullen] On a simplistic level, I would love it if I would happen to find the silver bullet that gave us the answer to Nebraska, but if there were a silver bullet, it would have been obvious by now.
The State's death certificates may hold other clues. Volunteers from the State Medical Association may be used to review the cause of every infant death in the past several years. It is information that will be sifted and sorted and hopefully will eventually make sense to a citizens panel charged with finding the solutions.
[Graf] I'm sure there will be an answer. We will know by the end of this panel what the causes of death were in this three-year period that we have had this little blip on the map if you will.
[Dr. Robertson] I think the bigger question is going to be what can we do about it to improve it.
I don't know how you solve a problem until you get to the socioeconomic and general health factors of the mother.
The suggestions may cover medical technique. They may cover social policy. Everyone agrees if they're going to be effective, they must be realistic and they must be measured.
[Dr. Raymond] I would like to have as my job as chairman to make sure when we make our recommendations that they aren't contentious politically so that therefore we turn people off. I think that's part of the job of the chairman to make sure the recommendations that come out are ones that are sellable and doable.
Oh, no, not the hair.
There are 23,000 babies born in Nebraska every year. Out of every 1,000, seven of those babies do not make it to their first birthday for whatever reason.
[Dr. Peck] It reverberates beyond that because it really speaks poorly for our community about how much we really care about our youngest. It speaks poorly about our state, about the basic building block of economic development for Nebraska. If we're known as a state where we let our babies die who could live, why would we invest any more in further economic development because that's our future work force? It should care to the politicians because it makes them look bad and they should care about it from their heart.
I know. I know.

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska .