County’s infant mortality rate below state average
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Though up slightly over the previous year’s figure, Warren County’s infant mortality rate is still below state and national infant mortality rates.
In 2000, three infants died in Warren County, giving the county an infant mortality rate of 5.2 per 1,000 live births. During this same period the state’s rate was 9.0 while the nation’s rate was 6.9, according to the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth in its recent publication “Kids Count 2002: The State of the Child in Tennessee.”
The term infant mortality rate is used to describe children who die before reaching their first birthday.
Statewide, 341, or over half of all infant deaths in 2002 were caused by complications due to prematurity. Other causes of infant death include 200 fatalities due to illness or other conditions, 89 deaths that were reported as attributable to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and four deaths due to “lack of care.”
In the United States, infant mortality rates were reduced drastically during the 20th Century. Around time of World War I, the commission reports, one in 10 babies born died before the age of one, with rates approaching one in five for minority infants.
While the overall rates have improved considerably since then, the disparity between the mortality rates of white babies and minority babies still exists and is currently greater than it was 20 years ago.
Here in Tennessee, black babies are almost three times as likely to die in the first year of life than their white counterparts, having an infant death rate of 18.1 per 1,000 live births as opposed to a rate of 6.6 for white babies.