COLUMBUS – Efforts to reduce infant mortality in Franklin County appear to be paying off, even though new research suggests many parents are still not following doctors’ advice that has proven effective in combating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Celebrate One, a partnership among Franklin County, Columbus Public Health and several private organizations to reduce infant-mortality rates, was created in 2014 with the goal of reducing Franklin County’s infant-mortality rate by 40 percent.
Numbers from this year are beginning to show some improvement: From Jan. 1 through the end of June, 72 babies died in Franklin County. That’s on pace for a nearly 13 percent reduction from last year’s 165 total baby deaths.
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In 2016, there were 165 total infant deaths in Franklin County, 8.7 deaths per 1,000 births, according to Columbus Public Health. The reason for the high rate, county leaders say, was poor or inadequate parental education about how to care for babies, as well as premature births and low birth weights.
Deaths from SIDS were cut in half over the past two decades, but it is still a leading cause of infant mortality, according to the American Academy of Pediatricians. And Ohio’s infant mortality rate of over seven percent is higher than the national rate.
Since 1994, the academy has recommended babies sleep on their backs to avoid the risk of SIDS but a new survey shows fewer than half of mothers are consistently following the recommendation – even though more than half say it’s a message they’re hearing from their doctors.
Dr. Mike Gittelman with the academy’s Ohio Chapter, says safety education is an uphill battle for pediatricians as they compete with mixed parenting messages on the internet and old-school mentalities.
“How many times have you heard, ‘When I was young, we had seven kids in the back of the station wagon; we didn’t have seatbelts, we were bouncing all around, no one got hurt.’ Yeah, because you were lucky,” he said. “But if you were in a collision, you could have gotten seriously hurt, and now we know that seatbelts significantly prevent the risk of injury and death.”
Gittelman notes 3,500 infant deaths a year are related to unsafe sleep in the U-S.