The D.C. government will launch a broad effort in 2008 to tackle infant mortality rates that have ticked up in the last two years and remain double the national average, District leaders announced Wednesday.

The city’s infant mortality rate dipped from 14.4 per 1,000 live births in 1996 to 13.6 in 2005, according to statistics released this week by the D.C. Department of Health. But the 2005 figure rose to its highest level since 1999, when 113 infants died out of 7,513 births. Nationally, the infant mortality rate has hovered for years around seven deaths per 1,000 births.