![]() “We are at a point where the threat to children’s health is not coming from a microorganism or a cancer cell,” said Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, lead author of the report. A spiraling mental health crisis looms across the landscape of child mortality. Another factor is alcohol and drugs, which caused twice as many child deaths in 2021 as in 2019, mostly via accidental overdose. One overarching factor is firearms: between homicides and suicides, guns accounted for nearly half of the overall increase in child mortality in 2020, the report found.įatal vehicular accidents, which declined for years, have rebounded and are elevating the youth death toll. In recent years, however, several new and alarming trends have conspired to change the course of pediatric health. Black and Hispanic boys are dying in homicides at much higher rates than non-Hispanic whites.īut researchers found the death rate rising for children of both genders and multiple races and across several causational categories, from car accidents to drug overdose. Boys are dying at nearly twice the rate of girls. Pediatric death rates are rising mostly because of injuries, as opposed to diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. They assigned blame to “manmade pathogens,” particularly guns and drugs. “These increases, the largest in decades, followed a period of great progress in reducing pediatric mortality rates,” the authors wrote. The death rate for children and adolescents rose by nearly 20 percent between 20, according to an analysis published on March 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ( The Hill) - Mortality rates for children are rising at rates not seen in at least half a century, interrupting a long era of progress in shepherding America’s youth to adulthood. ![]()
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