Infant Mortality (IMR)

The infant mortality rate: The risk of death during the first year.

It’s related to the following factors:

  • Underlying health of the mother
  • Public health practices
  • Socioeconomic conditions
  • Availability and use of appropriate health care for infants and pregnant women

Major causes:

  • Low birth weight babies born too soon(premature)
  • Too small (low-birth weight and intrauterine growth retardation)
  • Too sick

Decline in infant mortality rates is due to:

  • Health providers: ability to provide intensive care to premature infants
  • The establishment of regional neonatal intensive care unit
  • The healthcare industry's ability to prevent low birth weights.

Facts

  • Recently, the ratio of Black to White IMR was recorded as 2.3 in NJ, one of the highest in the nation.
  • Infants born to Black mothers who have college degrees and presumably greater affluence have greater mortality rates than infants of white women who have less than a college degree.

How this ties into our lives

  • TQ: The major cause of IMR has been linked to environmental factors.
  • The IMR accounts for the majority of deaths among individuals less than 18 years of age.
  • The decline in the IMR is closely linked to:
    • Advances in the medical care
    • Changes in the environment
  • Post neonatal mortality in African Americans has been most closely related to environmental factors.
  • The leading cause of death among school aged children is injury.

African American babies are 2-3 times as likely to be born; too soon, too small, too sick to survive.

Practices of health education

  • The single parent family is not a target of study to determine its effectiveness in health education.

The most common reason for delay in seeking medical treatment is: The denial of significance or threat of symptoms.

Infant mortality in the U.S.

  • The infant mortality rate in the U.S is considered high for a developed country. As of 2017, the infant mortality rate in the U.S ranks 170th
  • In 2016, the IMR for African Americans was: 11.4 deaths per 1000.
  • African Americans had 2.2 times the sudden infant death syndrome mortality rate of whites, according to most recent data(2017).

Most physicians visits by children aged 19 or youngers are to:

  1. Family
  2. General Practitioners

Measures taken in the management and prevention infant health problems

  • Managing high-risk pregnancies
  • Managing high-risk newborns
  • Preventing unwanted pregnancies among high risk parents

The plan to remove infant mortality rates includes:

  • A network between health care experts and minority communities to encourage healthy behaviors by pregnant women and parents of infants.
  • Research that will determine the cause of SIDs, develop effective strategies to identify at-risk infants more precisely.
  • Create effective interventions for high-risk infants.

Mortality rates for Blacks in the U.S. are increasing for: Adolescents