CDC Confirms the Brief, Hard Lives of Poor Kids (Pediatrics)
“Writing in Pediatrics, the authors examined data from the CDC’s Compressed Mortality Files and obtained population and poverty statistics from U.S. Census data. They found that counties with the highest concentration of poverty had more than three times the rate of death due to child abuse compared with the least poor counties. Nearly half of the child abuse fatalities were children less than a year old.
The authors concluded that public health officials should be aware of a county’s relative poverty status when considering high-risk areas for interventions to prevent child abuse.”