Federal officials have released a bleak assessment of the country’s progress in understanding and preventing stillbirths, calling the rate “unacceptably high” and issuing a series of recommendations to reduce it through research and prevention.
The National Institutes of Health report, titled “Working to Address the Tragedy of Stillbirth,” mirrored findings of an investigation by ProPublica last year into the U.S. stillbirth crisis, in which more than 20,000 pregnancies every year are lost at 20 weeks or more and the expected baby is born dead.
ProPublica’s reporting found that a number of factors contributed to the nation’s failure to bring down the stillbirth rate: medical professionals dismissing the concerns of their pregnant patients, a lack of research and data, and too few autopsies being performed. Additionally, alarming racial disparities in stillbirth rates have compounded the crisis.
“The extent of the problem is massive,” said Dr. Lucky Jain, who served as co-chair of the Stillbirth Working Group of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Council, which issued the report last week. “All of my life, I have maintained that what I cannot measure, I cannot improve. And so if I don’t have proper data, records, autopsy findings, genetics, the background information of why a fully formed baby died suddenly, how do I even begin improving things as a scientist?”
No comments:
Post a Comment