by Claudia Boyd-Barrett posted in Pregnancy

Fewer black infants are dying before their first birthday than a decade ago, but they?re still more than twice as likely to perish than white infants, according to a new study.
That?s a depressing statistic, to be sure. If health officials and researchers could figure out how to reduce infant mortality equally for all babies, it would save thousands of lives each year.
For the study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers analyzed 10 years of data on infant mortality from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Overall, they found that between 2005 and 2015, infant mortality declined for both black and white babies by 15 percent.
That?s the good news. The bad news is that, when the authors examined data by race, they found infant mortality was much higher among black babies than among white babies. In 2015, close to 12 out of every 1,000 black infants died before they reached 1 year old, compared to less than 5 out of every 1,000 white infants. What?s more, while the rate of white infant deaths decreased steadily through 2015, the decline in black infant deaths stalled in 2012, and rose slightly in 2015.
Preterm birth and low birth weight were among the biggest drivers of infant deaths, according to the report. In fact, black infants were almost 4 times more likely than white infants to die as a result of being born prematurely or underweight.
The report didn?t study why these disparities exist. However, experts...