In recent years, child and adolescent mortality rates in the US have risen sharply, raising concern among experts.
From 2019 to 2021, infant mortality increased 10.7 percent one year and 8.3 the next. However, despite what one might think, the COVID-19 pandemic has not been the main cause of this phenomenon.
And it is that, among the most common causes of the increase in the mortality rate in children and adolescents in the US are drug overdose, suicide, homicide and traffic accidents.
"One might be tempted to think that this has something to do with COVID-19. That is obviously the time period in which this occurred, but our analysis found that COVID-19 actually explained relatively little of this increase, these have been caused by trends that predate the pandemic, in some cases pre-pandemic. for many years," said Steven H. Woolf, professor of Family Medicine and Population Health at the University of California School of Medicine. Virginia Commonwealth University.
In a press conference organized by Ethnic Media Services, the expert pointed out that between the years of 2019 and 2021, deaths in children between the ages of 10 and 19 increased by 39 percent in the case of homicides, 114 percent due to overdose of drugs and 16 percent for automobile accidents.
Firearms, one of the main culprits
In her opportunity, Kim Parker, director of Social and Demographic Trends of the PEW Research Center, commented that in 2021, 60 percent of the deaths of children and adolescents were caused by homicide, while 32 percent were by suicide, both with firearms.
In this sense, Parker pointed out that there is a big difference between the deaths of children from Afro-descendant communities and white children, since most of the deaths of Afro-descendant children are due to homicide, while those of white children were due to suicide.
"Afro-descendant children and adolescents are much more likely than whites, Hispanics, and Asians to die from firearm-related injuries," he said.
For her part, Kelly Sampson, Senior Advisor and Director of Racial Justice at Brady United, pointed out that many of the problems facing the US in relation to firearms have a lot to do with aspects such as supremacy white and racism
And it is that Sampson recalled that “for example, the Supreme Court has made a decision of centuries of precedents to convert the Second Amendment from a civil right in defense of the State to a private right related to self-defense. And self-defense is racially coded in American culture."
In that sense, he pointed out that the magazine Nature published an article that demonstrated how society thinks about people who carry firearms in public.
It showed that white people who carried a firearm were considered by society to be heroic, while those from communities of color considered it because they had to protect themselves.
Increased need to protect the mental health of children and adolescents
Due to the latest incidents that have occurred around firearms, such as school shootings, parents have indicated that they are concerned about the mental health of their children.
Parker noted that one of the PEW Research Center surveys revealed that 22 percent of parents are very concerned that their child might be shot, while 42 percent of Hispanic parents said they were extremely or very concerned about it. "About a third of black parents have the same level of concern," and nearly 70 percent of parents are at least somewhat concerned that a shooting could occur at their children's school.
Mayra Alvarez, president of The Children's Partnership, pointed out that children and adolescents "are dying from causes that can be prevented" and stressed the importance of families having easy access to various basic services, as she pointed out that the stress they cause It is one of the causes for which children lose their lives.
«We must make it easier for families to enroll in public benefit programs and access the health, food, housing and other help they need because all these issues affect the mental health of our families, stress, depression, anxiety which occurs when when parents cannot pay for a child's food, rent or when they cannot take their children to the doctor, all these interconnected problems related to the fight against poverty and what that poverty contributes to these figures today," he concluded.
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