Black Infants And Children Consistently Have Double The Risk For Death Compared To Whites – Eurasia Review

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By Eurasia Review
A population-based surveillance study evaluated the extent and persistence of excess infant and childhood mortality among Black Americans between 1950 and 2019. The study found that while gaps in life expectancy and mortality decreased between Black and White Americans over the study period, relative mortality in infants and children increased.
According to the researchers, this is the first study to systematically examine data across the entire postwar era (from the 1950s to the present day) to assess long-term trends in race-based mortality disparities in the United States across the age spectrum. The findings suggest the need for innovative social, economic and health care policies to address the structural causes of inequity affecting mortality in Black Americans. The study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
An international team of researchers from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Yale School of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard University analyzed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Census Bureau between 1950 and 2019 to estimate sex and age specific excess mortality burden on Black Americans compared to White Americans.
The researchers gathered data from death certificates between 1960 – 2019 obtained from the CDC and death counts between 1950 – 1959 obtained from the Vital Statistics reports published by the Census Bureau. They calculated annual crude and age-standardized mortality rates, life expectancy, and years of life lost for Black and White Americans for every year in the study period. The data showed that life expectancy at birth increased by 20.4% and 13% between 1950 to 2019 among Black Americans and White Americans, respectively. In the 1950s, age-standardized mortality rate was 23% higher for Black Americans than White Americans; by the 2010s, this mortality ratio narrowed by 4% but remained 18% higher than in the White population.
In Black children, a total of 522,617 excess deaths in infancy and 689,724 during childhood occurred over the 70-year period. In the 1950s, the mortality rate was 92% percent higher in Black infants compared to White infants, with an excess mortality ratio of 1.92. While the mortality rates for both Black and White infants decreased in the 2010s, the mortality ratio increased, with Black infants dying 115% more frequently than white infants for a mortality ratio of 2.15. In the 2010s, medical conditions during the perinatal period were the largest cause of excess death in Black children younger than five years and external causes (including homicides, suicides, trauma, and accidental causes of death) were the most frequent cause of excess mortality in Black children between five to 19 years.
While excess mortality among Black children has decreased over the past seven decades, Black children still have double the risk of death than White children, a disparity that has not decreased since the 1950s. This analysis underscores racial inequities in childhood mortality seen since the 1950s in the U.S. and suggests the urgent need for increased public health and policy actions to reduce this gap.
Eurasia Review is an independent Journal that provides a venue for analysts and experts to disseminate content on a wide-range of subjects that are often overlooked or under-represented by Western dominated media.
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