Growing racial disparities are driving the rise in childhood deaths in the United States
Some context: A scary trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital in Richmond previously revealed that death rates among children and adolescents increased 18% between 2019 and 2021. Injury-related deaths grew so dramatically that they eclipsed all improvements in terms of public health.The team, seeking to delve deeper into this troubling 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 and 19 years old. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children, but the disparities – which had been improving through ...