<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/11/1606170442903.png" alt="About 1% of Black babies in Kansas die before their first birthday. Chris Neal / For the Kansas News Service" />
 <figcaption>About 1% of Black babies in Kansas die before their first birthday. Chris Neal / For the Kansas News Service</figcaption>
 </figure>By NOMIN UJIYEDIIN <a href="https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-11-23/black-babies-in-kansas-are-twice-as-likely-as-white-kids-to-die-before-their-first-birthday">Kansas News Service</a>Black and Native American babies in Kansas die at almost twice the rate as white infants in their first year of life.Out of every 1,000 live births, 11.8 Black and
 10.4 Native American babies die before their first birthdays in Kansas.
 Meanwhile, only 5.6 out of every 1,000 white babies die in that period.The data from 2013 to 2017 — originally gathered and published by the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/index.htm" target="_blank">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>, and newly collected in a report from the N<a href="https://www.hopeinitiative.org/" target="_blank">ational Collaborative for Health Equity</a> — suggests that race can be a major factor in a community’s health.The
 report collects and publishes numerous health measures gathered by 
government surveys over the past decade. It shows Black people and other
 people of color in Kansas are also more likely to live in areas with a 
high density of liquor stores and a greater frequency of robberies and 
homicides.Those factors can cause stress that can damage the 
health of mothers and their babies, said Gail Christopher, executive 
director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity.“Safety 
is a very important factor in terms of the perception of health and 
well-being,” Christopher said. “Fear translates into a physiological, 
biochemical stress reaction.”Black mothers may also have trouble 
getting to doctor’s appointments because they live too far from 
hospitals and other medical providers and because they don’t have 
reliable access to transportation or can’t take time off of work. 
People’s income, education level or neighborhood can also impact whether
 they can even choose healthier behaviors, she said.“Behavior is 
driven by environment. It’s driven by context,” she said. “If there are 
no grocery stores within your vicinity that sell produce, how are you 
going to make sure that you’re getting in five servings of vegetables a 
day?”Those factors may also have affected COVID-19’s <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html" target="_blank">disproportionate impact</a> on Black, Latino, Asian and Native American communities across the U.S.In Kansas, <a href="https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-04-23/black-kansans-at-least-7-times-more-likely-to-die-from-coronavirus-than-white-kansans" target="_blank">Black people were more likely to die</a>
 of coronavirus-related causes in the early days of the pandemic, when 
most cases were in urban parts of the state. Now that cases have risen 
in rural counties, the <a href="https://www.coronavirus.kdheks.gov/160/COVID-19-in-Kansas" target="_blank">death rate among Black Kansans</a> lags slightly behind that of white Kansans.The
 pandemic has especially highlighted the impact that housing and food 
insecurity have on health, Christopher said. Black Kansans are about 
half as likely to own their homes when compared to white Kansans, and 
more likely to spend a large portion of their incomes on housing 
expenses.<h2>Interpersonal and structural racism</h2>Higher rates of illnesses and death can also be the result of racism in medicine, Christopher said.“Everyone
 in our society carries biases,” she said. “How do we create ways of 
delivering care that help to mitigate the possibility that those biases 
are actually driving our decisions and our outcomes?”A legacy of 
racism exists not only in society as a whole, but also among medical 
providers who may treat Black patients differently, said Dr. Michelle 
Ogunwole, a physician and health disparities researcher at Johns Hopkins
 University. <a href="https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain" target="_blank">Studies show</a> that doctors are less likely to take Black patients’ pain seriously.“If you feel like something’s wrong, but that people don’t listen to you,” Ogunwole said, “that has implications for outcomes.”Hospitals that mostly treat Black patients tend to have fewer resources, Ogunwole said. That also leads to<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22816447/" target="_blank"> poorer health outcomes</a> for <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4698019/" target="_blank">patients at those hospitals</a>, regardless of race.One possible solution: increasing the number of Black physicians. A 2020 study found that the increase in <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/35/21194" target="_blank">mortality rates for Black babies dropped by half </a>when the children were cared for by Black physicians.Black
 physicians can also be more effective at educating Black patients about
 their health, Ogunwole said. She said she sometimes uses her own 
experiences as a Black person to relate to her patients.“I will definitely lean into that identity,” she said. “It ends up being way more effective.”But medical schools at historically Black colleges and universities have been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739050/" target="_blank">less well funded</a>
 than medical schools at historically white colleges. And Black medical 
students can be affected by the same racism and lack of access to care 
that have impacted their patients’ lives.“Those people have to be supported in a different way,” Ogunwole said, “so they can make it through the pipeline.”Ultimately,
 Ogunwole said, Black mothers and patients don’t necessarily need to be 
treated by Black doctors, but by people who respect and value them, 
regardless of race.“(Women) just want to be cared for and for 
people to value them and their children,” she said. “They just want what
 everybody wants, which is to live healthy and full lives.”Nomin
 Ujiyediin reports on criminal justice and social welfare for the Kansas
 News Service. You can email her at nomin@kcur.org and follow
 her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/nominuj" target="_blank">@NominUJ</a>.

Black babies in Kan. twice as likely as white kids to die before age 1