Maternal and infant health at risk in Mississippi after cuts at critical CDC program
Widespread layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have slowed a federal-state program that maintains a national database on maternal and infant health—and have led Mississippi health officials to pause that state’s data collection for the program even as it grapples with a public health emergency over rising numbers of infant deaths.
Mississippi stopped collecting data for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), a partnership between health officials at the state level and at the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health—which lost most of its staff last spring amid the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers.
In a Sept. 16 Guardian article, Rita Hamad, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explained that PRAMS is essentially the only state and national database that gathers annual data about the health of pregnant and postpartum women and their infants. She thinks that a lack of up-to-date data from PRAMS could lead to more maternal and infant illness and death.
“We don’t have ways to track the risk factors and we can’t study the policies to fix the problems,” Hamad said. “It’s really gonna be a catastrophe moving forward.”
Read the Guardian article: Mississippi declares infant deaths emergency as CDC program that could have helped is halted
