Related Post
(Trends Wide) — The US child and adolescent mortality rate skyrocketed in 2020 and 2021, a boost not fueled by deaths from covid-19, but by fatal injuries from firearms, drugs and car accidents, according to a study published this Monday in the academic journal JAMA.
The pandemic years produced a marked change in infant mortality trends, which had previously seen a “period of great progress,” according to the study authors. Pediatric deaths had been on the rise, but the most recent annual increases, of nearly 11% in 2020 and more than 8% in 2021, have been the largest in decades.
“Medicine and public health have made remarkable progress in lowering pediatric mortality rates, but the lives they have saved are now endangered by synthetic pathogens,” the authors wrote in the School of Medicine study. Medicine from Virginia Commonwealth and Washington Universities.
If deaths from covid-19 and injuries are excluded, infant mortality actually decreased.
Death rates from covid-19 doubled in children between 2021 and 2021, but this only explains about a fifth of the increase in the death rate in 2021, according to the study.
Instead, firearms “play a central role,” according to the authors, accounting for almost half of the increase in mortality in 2020.
“Current efforts to understand gun violence, overcome political hurdles, and implement sound gun policies are not moving as fast as child suicides and homicides require,” they wrote.
Infants are the only age group that did not show a significant increase in mortality, as most of the increase was due to deaths among older children.
For those ages 10 to 19, the mortality rate increased 23% between 2019 and 2021, including homicides that skyrocketed 39% and overdoses that more than doubled.
But even among the youngest children, ages 1 to 9, injuries accounted for nearly two-thirds of the increase in the death rate between 2022 and 2021, according to the study.
“Research and policy efforts to address underlying causes—for example, depression, suicidality, opioid use, systemic racism, widening inequality gap, social conflict—are urgent, as is a system redesign to provide help to people affected by these conditions,” the study authors wrote.
“A nation that begins to lose its most precious population, its children, faces a crisis like no other.”
