As we noted in Monday’s blog post, April is Minority Health Month, so we took the occasion to discuss racial disparities in health – particularly with respect to infant mortality rates. An April 24th  article in the Journal Sentinel by Crocker Stephenson sheds new light on the extent of the problem in Milwaukee. The article reports that although Milwaukee’s infant mortality rate dropped to a historic low last year, the gap between blacks and whites grew, with black infants almost three times as likely to die in their first year as white babies.

According to preliminary 2011 data compiled by the Milwaukee Health Department, the overall infant mortality rate in Milwaukee declined to 10.2 deaths for every 1,000 live births, compared to 10.4 deaths in 2010 and 10.5 in 2009. The white infant mortality rate fell to 5.0, compared to 5.6 two years earlier, while the black rate edged up to 14.5 last year, from 14.4 in 2010 and 14.3 in 2009. That begins to reverse the significant progress made in the previous several years, when Milwaukee’s black infant mortality rate fell from 18.1 in 2006 to 14.3 in 2009.Dane County actually had even higher infant mortality rates than Milwaukee last year for both blacks and whites. As David Wahlberg reported in the March 30 State Journal, the racial gap in infant mortality declined dramatically from 2002 to 2007, drawing the county positive national attention, but the mortality rate for black infants began to bounce back in 2008 and is once again a very significant problem in Dane County. In 2011 that rate was 16.7 deaths per 1,000 births for blacks, compared to 5.67 deaths per 1,000 births for whites.

One of the causes in Milwaukee, and also apparently in Dane County, is unsafe sleeping, including adults sleeping with infants. The Journal Sentinel has reported on that frequently in their ongoing Empty Cradles series. And in a short editorial blog Tuesday, Ernst-Ulrich Franzen of the Journal Sentinel noted that: “A recent report from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said although rates for most causes of child injuries have been dropping, suffocation rates are on the rise, with a 54% increase in reported suffocation among infants less than 1 year old.”

Read more about the infant mortality issue in the Journal Sentinel’s excellent Empty Cradles series.

Jon Peacock