U.S. most dangerous wealthy country for children
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Across all ages and in both sexes, children have been dying more often in the U.S. than in similar countries since the 1980s, Ashish P. Thakrar, Alexandra D. Forrest, Mitchell G. Maltenfort, and Christopher B. Forrest write in HealthAffairs.
According to the authors, “we examined mortality trends for [20] nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for children ages 0-19 from 1961 to 2010 using publicly available data.”
They discovered that, “Over the fifty-year study period, the lagging U.S. performance amounted to over 600,000 excess deaths.”
“While child mortality progressively declined across all countries, mortality in the U.S. has been higher than in peer nations since the 1980s,” they indicate.
“From 2001 to 2010 the risk of death in the U.S. was 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1-19. During this decade, children ages 15-19 were eighty-two times more likely to die from gun homicide in the U.S.” ■