Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

We are your weekly guide to the numbers all around you and I'm Tim Halford.

Today we have two stories based on emails from loyal listeners.

Later we'll be looking at shark deaths, but first human births.

Loyal listeners Lucy and Charles Grieve sent us an email asking if we could look into a short paragraph

in Dr Michael Mosley's book The Clevergut Diet.

The statistics that caught our attention more on page 74 where we're told that the rate of

sea section births in the UK is 26%, 35% in the USA, but 50% in China and 80% in Brazil.

We find it hard to believe that China and Brazil have such high rates of cesarean section.

We were doubt that 50% of births in China and 80% of births in Brazil take place in hospitals.

Please look into this for us.

We asked reporter Mae Cameron to get on the case with this one. Hello Mae.

Hi Tim. So my first question is what has a book about guts and diet got to do with sea sections?

Michael Mosley is writing about the idea of good bacteria and refers to research showing that

babies delivered by cesarean section are slower to gain these good bacteria in their gut.

The idea is that babies who are born vaginally pick up more of this bacteria on their way out into the world.

So I can see why he's interested. But what about Charles and Lucy's question?

If we start with China, they doubt that 50% of births are in hospitals at all,

that alone via sea section, are they right to doubt?

This might surprise our listeners, but about 99% of women in China give birth in hospitals.

Really? There are some rural parts of China that are still pretty underdeveloped, I would have thought.

There are, but the experts I talked to thought the figure was plausible.

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