TV Reviews : On PBS, the Numbing Reality of Infant Mortality in U.S.

“Frontline,” on PBS stations tonight (9 p.m. on Channel 28, 10 p.m. on Channel 50), focuses on a depressingly familiar subject--infant mortality, how much could be done to prevent it and how little is.

Utterly devoid of flash, the report would risk boredom but for the abject futility of its subject, which transforms it into a gripping hour of worthwhile television.

Set on the west side of Chicago, “Frontline” examines the numbing reality confronting outreach programs and health workers at Cook County Hospital. Matter-of-factly, the documentary establishes that:

--Chicago, like most American inner cities, has an infant mortality rate worse than many Third World countries. Public health nurses must often give up on a patient after seeing her just once because they must minister to so many others.

--Drug use is so epidemic and legitimate economic opportunities so rare that addict mothers frequently give birth to infants doomed from the moment they are delivered.

--Private clinics that rip off the state’s Medicaid program absorb vast amounts of meager government resources. Private hospitals dump poor patients. Government officials offer little but platitudes. Yet adequate prenatal care costs $700 or less per woman while care for premature, troubled babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at Cook County Hospital costs $24,000 each.

These are not revelations. But, chiefly through the eyes of grass-roots health workers, “Frontline” effectively and powerfully shows that, while the story may be an old one, it has lost none of its provocative desperation.

Outreach worker Patricia Johnson, frustrated after a cocaine-using mother disappears from the hospital during an appointment for which Johnson’s program spent hours in arrangements, sighs and summarizes what must be the feelings of a legion of people like her. Almost in tears, she asks: “What else can I do?”