WASHINGTON�? Memphis and Shelby County?s high rate of infant mortality was a focus of a Capitol Hill briefing today that also looked at maternal mortality, pre-conception health and the budget pressures confronting public health programs.
It was in part a reprise of a September 2009 event at the National Press Club where the documentary film�?Crisis in the Crib? by Tonya Lewis Lee, Spike Lee?s wife, made its Washington debut. Lee, who spoke at today?s event and heads up the�?Healthy Baby Begins with You? campaign, looked at Shelby County?s disproportionate rate of infant mortality in the film and now travels the country drawing attention to it.
Lee said the country is�?health illiterate? and that women need to know to be healthy before they conceive. As another expert on the panel, Dr. Richard N. Waldman, an obstetrician, pointed out,�?it?s becoming culturally acceptable to be very, very heavy,? but obesity makes for difficult pregnancies and raises the rate of Caesarian sections.
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., told the moving story of his sister, Rosemary, who died shortly after she was born in 1946, to draw attention to the devastation such deaths have on parents and families. His district contains ZIP Code 38108 in North Memphis where 31 of 1,000 babies don?t reach their first birthdays, or almost five times the national rate.
His recent visit to Rwanda to study infant mortality, he said, reminded him of parts of his Memphis district, adding,�?that?s an indictment of the United States of America.?
Dr. Garth N. Graham director of the Office of Minority Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, who teaches at Harvard?s medical school, said the disparities between birth outcomes for black and white children remain persistent and aren?t exclusively an issue of socioeconomic factors. Babies of African American women with college degrees have higher mortality rate than babies of women with only high school diplomas.
Waldman, of Syracuse, N.Y., and a past president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, advocated both a bill that Cohen has introduced that would collect detailed health information on both mothers and babies on birth certificates and greater use by states of death certificates with a box to check if a woman had been pregnant within a year of death in order to give researchers accurate data on rates of maternal death.
Brent M. Ewig, director of public policy for the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, said public health officials are often�?typecast as whiners,? but that the budget cuts affecting public health should be a big concern for all.
Ewig said some dispute whether 45 other countries have better one-year survival rates than the United States,�?we?re not doing as well as we should.? He said even excellent access to prenatal care for seven or eight months does not make up for a lifetime of poor nutrition and poor health.
Despite the growing awareness of the problem, Ewig noted that a Senate appropriations committee this week cut funding to a 76-year-old program that funnels money to the states to deal with prenatal care while 43,000 public health workers have lost their jobs in the current downturn.
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