Free Republic

As Americans discuss black livelihood in the context of recent high-profile black deaths at the hands of police officers, a merciless villain is quietly snatching away thousands of black lives each year: infant mortality. To be sure, medicine has gone a long way toward keeping black babies alive. In 1850, the black infant-mortality rate was 340 per 1,000 (compared with 217 per 1,000 for whites). Still, despite progress, last year over 7,000 black babies died in the United States before reaching one year of age — one baby for every 87 born. Troublingly, the infant-mortality rate is far higher for...

SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Researchers have identified a genetic variation that increases by 24 times the risk of a black baby in the United States succumbing to sudden infant death syndrome, or crib death. According to a report published Wednesday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, about one in nine American blacks carries a copy of the variant gene, but children who carry two copies of the mutation face the increased risk. Overall, mutations in the gene, called SCN5A, were found in 5 percent of the 133 SIDS cases in black infants reviewed by scientists. And the researchers estimate that...