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Striking new stats from a Quebec study illuminate just how challenging it can be for some Indigenous parents to raise healthy children. According to researchers at the University of Montreal and major First Nations community health services in Quebec, Indigenous babies are twice as likely to be hospitalized as their non-Indigenous counterparts.
The study, which was published May 29 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at 19,770 First Nations, 3,930 Inuit and 225,380 non-Indigenous babies born between 1996 and 2010 in Quebec. Respiratory diseases and infections were the most common causes of hospitalization in infants. When comparing First Nations and Inuit versus non-Indigenous infants, researchers found there were 70 to 80 more hospitalizations per 1,000 infants for respiratory diseases, and 30 to 40 more hospitalizations per 1,000 infants for infections. Indigenous babies were about twice as likely to develop bronchiolitis and about seven times as likely to develop pneumonia. This comes after a 2016 report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that found Indigenous children are also more than twice as likely to live in poverty than non-Indigenous children, and after a ruling from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal last week that found Ottawa was discriminating against Aboriginal kids by failing to comply with orders to provide them with adequate care.
?The excess risks of these diseases may be related to infant immun...