A little context: a scary trend taken a closer look.
Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and Richmond Children’s Hospital previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents increased by 18% between 2019 and 2021. Injury-related deaths increased so spectacularly that they had eclipsed all progress in public health.
The group, seeking to delve further into this worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children aged 1 at 19 years old. They found that Black and Native American Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children, but the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.
The data also found that while infant mortality rates in general worsened around 2020, rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had started increasing much earlier, around 2014.
Between 2014 and 2020, mortality rates for black children and adolescents increased by about 37 percent, and those of Native American youth by about 22 percent, compared to less than 5 percent for white youth.
“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the VCU School of Medicine who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”
The numbers: Injuries, particularly caused by firearms, are at the origin of the disparities.
Racial and ethnic disparities were more pronounced when injuries were isolated from other causes of death. For example, the rate of deaths of black children by homicide is 10 times higher than that of white children between 2016 and 2020. When the study’s lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, associate professor of pediatrics at the VCU School of Medicine, compared accidents to intentional injuries, the sad realities of the mental health crisis came into focus.
Native American children commit suicide at twice the rate of white children, whose rate was already high.
“As a pediatrician, this really took my breath away,” she said.
Gun-related deaths, including accidents, homicides, and suicides, were two to four times higher among black and Native American youth than among white youth, and the risk of dying from a gun-related injury gun ownership more than doubled among black and Native American youth. between 2013 and 2020.
Researchers also drew attention to disparities in other causes of death: Native American children died of pneumonia and influenza at rates three times higher than white children, for example, and black children died of asthma almost eight times more than white children.
What happens next: further research and policy changes.
This particular study did not examine all of the variables that contribute to the causes of childhood illness, injury, and death. Dr. Wolf said she hoped the paper would serve as a “wake-up call” and prompt researchers to examine the underlying factors.
Understanding the reasons for increased deaths in car crashes, for example, could determine whether redesigned intersections or targeted seat belt campaigns would be the most effective intervention for a specific group.
For other child deaths, access to care is a likely factor, given that black children with circulatory diseases are less likely to be referred for a transplant and less likely to have a successful procedure than white children . Asthma-related illness and death are likely to be affected by access to interventions such as inhalers, as well as socio-economic and environmental factors such as air pollution.
At the same time, Dr. Woolf said, policymakers should not “wait for more research to identify obvious next steps,” including support for children’s mental health and stricter gun laws. Public perception of gun violence among children often focuses on school shootings, he said, but statistically speaking, “the vast majority occurs in communities across our country — day after day, one after another.” a “.
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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