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Israel systematically targets the health of pregnant mothers and infants in Gaza. This is a reality every parent in Gaza knows. It has also been confirmed repeatedly by others. Pediatric healthcare professionals in Gaza have been bravely speaking out about how Israel is currently using restrictions of formula into Gaza to torture and kill Palestinian babies.
Republicans will cut and defund prevention because it's easy for their rotted minds and black hearts to forget why we have these policies in the first place.
Child mortality is where truly disturbed unqualified white men use eugenics and racism to inflict harm onto our shared society.
Surprising New Research Links Infant Mortality to Crashing Bat Populations. (New York Times)
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The connections are commonsense but the conclusion is shocking.
Bats eat insects. When a fatal disease hit bats, farmers used more pesticides to protect crops. And that, according to a new study, led to an increase in infant mortality.
According to the research, published Thursday in the journal Science, farmers in affected U.S. counties increased their use of insecticides by 31 percent when bat populations declined. In those places, infant mortality rose by an estimated 8 percent.
“It’s a seminal piece,” said Carmen Messerlian, a reproductive epidemiologist at Harvard who was not involved with the research. “I actually think it’s groundbreaking.”
The new study tested various alternatives to see if something else could have driven the increase: Unemployment or drug overdoses, for example. Nothing else was found to cause it.
Dr. Messerlian, who studies how the environment affects fertility, pregnancy and child health, said a growing body of research is showing health effects from toxic chemicals in our environment, even if scientists can’t put their fingers on the causal links.
“If we were to reduce the population-level exposure today, we would save lives,” she said. “It’s as easy as that.”
The new study is the latest to find dire consequences for humans when ecosystems are thrown out of balance. Recent research by the same author, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, found that a die-off of vultures in India had led to half a million excess human deaths as rotting livestock carcasses polluted water and spurred an increase in feral dogs, spreading waterborne diseases and rabies.
“We often pay a lot of attention to global extinctions, where species completely disappear,” Dr. Frank said. “But we start experiencing loss and damages well before that.”
Mississippi: “We’re declaring a public health emergency because our infant mortality rate is the highest it’s been in over a decade.”
Also Mississippi: closes rural hospitals, slashes healthcare programs, and acts confused when babies die.
9.7 babies per 1,000 births
didn’t make it to their first birthday in 2024. That’s not just a statistic, that’s a state-sized obituary.
Since 2014, over 3,500 Mississippi babies have died before turning one. But sure, let’s keep debating whether healthcare is a “luxury.”
Every dead infant = a devastated family.
Every devastated family = a broken community.
Every broken community = a policy choice dressed up as “oops, public health emergency.”
It’s not an emergency if you saw it coming for ten years. It’s negligence with a press release.
The only hospital in the country using foetal safety software has seen baby fatalities drop by 82% in three years
"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.
At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.
In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.
Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.
The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.
Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.
“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.
The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.
“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”
The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.
Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.
Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.
Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.
“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"
-via The Guardian, December 6, 2024
Fetch quest!
transcription below:
Black newborn babies in the United States are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, but three times more likely than White Babies to die when looked after by White doctors, a study has found.
The mortality rate of Black newborns in hospital shrunk by between 39% and 58% when Black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research, which laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person’s life.
By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor’s race.
The findings support previous research, which has shown that, while infant mortality rates have fallen in recent decades, Black children remain significantly more likely to die early than their White counterparts.
US infant mortality rates decline, CDC study says, but Black infants still twice as likely to die
Researchers from George Mason University analyzed data capturing 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 for the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, also known as PNAS. @blacklandskonnected
"During Trump’s first three months in office, 11.7 million women and girls were denied birth control due to the U.S. grant cuts, the Guttmacher Institute estimated. Of those, 4.2 million faced unintended pregnancies and 8,340 died from complications during pregnancy and childbirth, the group estimated.
"f these funding cuts continue through 2025, which Trump has signaled they will, an estimated 47.6 million women and girls will be denied contraceptive care, 17.1 million will experience unwanted pregnancies and 34,000 will die.
“'The administration’s decision to terminate all family planning grants represents for us an unprecedented abandonment of American leadership on the world stage,' Jonathan Wittenberg, co-president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, told reporters during a press call on the Trump administration’s impacts on global sexual and reproductive health.
"Aid workers and advocates described confusion and despair when critical reproductive health care simply disappeared overnight in countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The sudden loss of funding led to a shortage of health-care providers and increased burnout for those who stayed. The supply chains that delivered vital medical supplies have vanished. Abortion stigma is back on the rise, deterring women and girls from seeking the health care that is available.
“'These intersecting realities are deepening inequalities and eroding what little infrastructure we have to protect women and girls and gender minorities,' Fabiola Mizero, the regional director of Ipas Francophone Africa, told reporters on the same call.
"Aid workers and advocates described confusion and despair when critical reproductive health care simply disappeared overnight in countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The sudden loss of funding led to a shortage of health-care providers and increased burnout for those who stayed. The supply chains that delivered vital medical supplies have vanished. Abortion stigma is back on the rise, deterring women and girls from seeking the health care that is available."
From the article.
