The infant mortality rate will have to drop 36 percent overall and even more in the black and Native American communities for the United States to meet a key 2010 health target, federal health officials said Thursday.
In a sobering study published in its weekly health report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that as of 2002 no state had reached the government’s decade-end target of 4.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
Only a handful, mostly those with relatively small numbers of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, are within reach, CDC researchers added. The U.S. infant mortality rate was 7 per 1,000 in 2002, the latest year that full data was available.
'Aggressive' action needed
“It’s going to take aggressive public health measures to lower it to that target by the end of the decade,” said T.J. Mathews, a CDC demographer and lead author of the study.
Besides improving access to the health care system and reemphasizing the importance of prenatal care, the CDC study suggested the United States could not address infant mortality as long as gaping racial disparities in such deaths persist.
Although infant mortality fell across racial lines during the 1995-2002 period, there was little change in the gaps between the races.
Non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 29 percent of the 225,534 infant deaths reported in the nation between 1995 and 2002, more than double this group’s percentage of the total population, according to the CDC.
Non-Hispanic whites made up about half of the deaths, while Hispanics represented about 16 percent. Asians and Pacific Islanders had a disproportionately low infant mortality rate, while Native Americans had a relatively high one.
Focus on expecting mothers
The study came less than two years after the Atlanta-based CDC reported that infant mortality had risen for the first time in 44 years. Preliminary data for 2003 indicates the 2002 rise may have been an aberration.
Some health experts have urged the United States, which has a higher infant mortality rate than many other Western nations, to allocate more medical resources to prenatal care than to intensive newborn care.
Focusing on the health of expectant mothers could improve the survival rate of infants delivered with low birth weights, one of the risk factors for infant mortality.
Smoking, stress, certain infections and lack of access to prenatal medical care are factors believed to increase the likelihood that an expectant mother will deliver a baby with a low birth weight.
