Mississippi declares infant deaths emergency as CDC program that could have helped is halted | Trump administration

The reshuffle by the Trump Administration of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) forced Mississippi to stop collecting critical data on the experiences of women before, during and After pregnancy – even if the state recently declared a public health emergency on its increasing infant mortality rate.

Mississippi has Suspending data collection for the pregnancy risk assessment monitoring system (PRAMS), a national database that has been an integral part of the development of maternal and infantile health policies for almost four decades, the Guardian learned.

Prams works as a partnership between health officials at the state level and a little -known but influential CDC agency called Division of Reproductive Health, which has lost most of its staff – Nearly 100 people – in the purges of federal workers in the Trump administration, according to files In A trial brought by several States led by Democrats on purges.

Consequently, many of the projects in the division, including the landonons, stopped, according to the trial.

The division will probably not be able to obtain specific data at the national level of maternal and child health in 2024, 2025 and 2026, said a member of the personnel of the nameless CDC in a declaration included in the trial.

Researchers are counting on PRAMS data to test potential health interventions to improve maternal and child health, While states use it to plead for federal funding programs that aim to reduce infants’ deaths, improve care for women and help children with special needs.

The changes in the division forced the Mississippi to end its PRAMS 2024 data collection and have delayed its 2025 collection, said a spokesman for the Mississippi Health Department in an email. The spokesman also assigned the work stoppage to “a federal directive” published in January, but did not answer follow-up questions on the nature of this directive. In the meantime, the spokesman said that the ministry is being analyzed by his existing Prams data.

In response to several questions for this story, a CDC spokesman said that the States had received funding for data collection 2025 In May, to start collecting data this summer, and that the agency “plans to support PRAMS data management activities” for 2024 and 2025 data. Neither the CDC nor the Mississippi answered the clarifying follow -up questions why the data collection was arrested.

The Mississippi declared an emergency of public health in August after its health service found that the infant mortality rate of the State had increased in 2024 to 9.7 deaths for 1,000 living births – its highest point in more than a decade. Between 2014 and 2024, more than 3,500 babies died before their first birthday.

Although researchers can always use birth and death certificates to examine the general trends in infant mortality, these recordings do not have the granular details followed by prams.

“PRAMS is essentially the only national and national data set which obtains data on the health of pregnant women and postpartum and their infants each year,” said Rita Hamad, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard Th Chan School of Public Health.

The trial of the States led by Democrats alleys that, although certain “contract examiners” have recently launched in data collection for PRAMS, “their efforts were not supervised and not coordinated leading to a data collection unusable by the applicant’s states”. The disintegration of the reproductive health division means that there is no longer to supervise the landonons and to shape data in working condition, a former CDC employee in The Guardian told.

“If you do not maintain staff, funding will not be used effectively,” said the employee. “Perinatal epidemiologists are not a penny. Trying to dismiss them while retaining a healthy company for mothers and babies is simply not possible. ”

“What do we change for families?”

In its declaration that the Mississippi infant mortality rate was a public health emergency, the State Health Department declared that it would strive to increase the capacity of counties to offer prenatal care, educate families on safe sleep practices for infants and strengthen a program that offers home visits to pregnant women. The declaration does not unlock additional funding; A spokesperson for the department called it “an administrative tool to help us accelerate the implementation of plans and resources”.

“Part of the plan includes a complete and large-scale public relations campaign that is in preparation,” added the spokesperson.

But the defenders believe that the expansion Pre and postnatal care, although helpful, are not enough.

The Trump administration plans to reduce more than 1 TN in Medicaid, the US government insurance program for low -income persons. Cassandra Welchin, Executive Director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Aclavable Mississippi Group, wants the Mississippi to devote more state dollars to compensate for these cups. Medicaid pays almost 60% of births to Mississippi, a share of around 20% higher than the national average.

She also wants the Mississippi, which currently respects the US federal minimum wage of $ 7.25 per hour, to set a higher minimum wage.

“This is a problem of poverty,” said Welchin about the infant mortality crisis. “If people have higher income, they are better able to take care of themselves and their families.”

The capacity of the Mississippi Health Department to approach one of the main causes of infant mortality in Mississippi, congenital anomalies, Probably be hampered by the almost total prohibition of state abortion. Research has repeatedly linked the abortion of abortion to higher infant mortality, in part because they force people to wear pregnancies with congenital anomalies that they would have otherwise finished.

Defenders call on the State to better approach racial disparities in infant mortality. In Mississippi, as in the rest of the United States, blacks face disproportionate infant mortality rates. The state health service found that in 2024, the infant mortality rate in whites was 5.8 deaths for 1,000 living births. Among the blacks, it was 15.2.

Nikeitra Burse leads six dimensions, a Mississippi public health company, and sits on the state maternal mortality committee. His aunt and sister-in-law died a few weeks after childbirth, while her sister was diagnosed with preeclampsia and finally gave birth to a son who died at eight months. All were black.

“These are women who had an education. My aunt had a master’s degree. They had access to health care. They had family defenders, “said Burse. “They had all the boxes that America wants you to check so that you can sail in this system in a healthy way, but they still have not been able to get out of the healthy system.”

But experts say that Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are hindering efforts to fight against racial public health disparities. In Mississippi, according to government files, the administration dismissed a subsidy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which financed a “partnership to optimize equity in maternal and child health”. At the time of termination, the files indicate that the NIH still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Grant Returning Delta Health Alliance, a non -profit organization focused on the improvement of the life of the people of the Mississippi Mississippi Delta, a region whose population is mainly black. (The organization did not respond for a request for comments on termination.)

In the end, Hamad believes that attacks against landonons will lead to higher maternal and infant mortality and infant morbidity.

“We have no means to follow risk factors and we cannot study policies to solve problems,” she said. “It will really be a disaster that goes ahead.”