Georgia health officials laid out efforts on Tuesday to stem the tide of increasing deaths among new mothers in the state as evidence shows that the rate of death from pregnancy has risen more steeply in Georgia that almost any other state.
“This needle moves slowly, but we need to start working on things,” Dr. Mitch Rodriguez, a member of the Board of Public Health and a neonatal specialist in Macon, said during a board meeting. “It’s going to take us a while to make those changes, but you have to start at some point.”
The state’s numbers found that 113 women died from pregnancy-related causes in the years 2018 to 2020, either during pregnancy or in the year after birth. That’s 30.2 deaths for every 100,000 live births.
A study published last week by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the Boston-based Mass General Brigham health system found that between 1999 and 2019, Georgia was among the five worst states for increasing mortality among white, Hispanic, Black and Asian-Pacific Islander women. Death rates for all those groups more than doubled over the 20-year period, the study found.
While Georgia found 48.6 deaths per 100,000 births for Black mothers, the researchers estimated the number is roughly 100 per 100,000. That means 1 Black mother dies for every 1,000 births in Georgia. That study used a different methodology and is not comparable to Georgia’s numbers, said Department of Public Health spokesperson Nancy Nydam.
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A third set of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Georgia had the seventh-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation from 2018 to 2021.
In any case, officials agree the death rate isn’t declining in Georgia, where officials estimate that 89% of maternal deaths between 2018 and 2020 were preventable. Public Health Commissioner Kathleen Toomey said Tuesday that’s a broad, “multidisciplinary” definition of…
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