Why U.S. kids are dying at higher rates than in other wealthy countries
Children in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other wealthy, developed countries. A study points to high infant mortality, along with gun deaths and drug overdoses, as primary reasons.
Children in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other wealthy, developed countries.
Research published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics attempts to calculate these “excess deaths” — in other words, how many more kids under age 19 are dying in the U.S. compared to similar countries.
The estimate: 20,000 per year. It’s a bleak picture of the country’s pediatric health.
“The chances of a child surviving to age 20 are now decreasing” after decades of progress, said Dr. Steven Woolf, the study’s co-author and a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.
For the study, Woolf and his colleagues calculated the median mortality rates for children in 16 countries outside the U.S. — Australia, Canada, Japan and 13 European countries — from 1999 to 2019. They compared those rates to the mortality rates for children in the U.S. during the same years, then multiplied the difference by the size of the U.S. population for each year.
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