City Gets $5.4M To Combat Infant Mortality

Some $5.4 million in new federal money is coming to town to continue to combat infant mortality citywide and to reduce glaring ethnic and racial disparities in birth outcomes.

The announcement of that grant from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for the city’s Healthy Start program was made Friday afternoon at the offices of the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven (CFGNH). Forty staffers, officials, and beneficiaries celebrated what was termed a ​“significant” achievement.

The money, a fifth round of federal funding since the program began in 1997, will support New Haven Healthy Start through 2019.

“Infant and mother health remains at the top of our priority list,” said CFGNH President and CEO Will Ginsberg. Healthy Start is the outgrowth of a commission, created in the 1980s by CFGNH, that tackled high infant-mortality rate in New Haven, especially in the minority neighborhoods. That commission’s campaign succeeded in dramatically lowering the rate, which a decade ago began inching back up.

Click here for a description of Healthy Start, which has become the ​“glue” coordinating the wide range of programs and services citywide for new moms.

Since 1997, Healthy Start has helped to reduce the infant mortality rate among minorities citywide from 18.4 per thousand births to 14 per thousand, said Healthy Start Program director Kenn Harris. Among those participating in Healthy Start’s programs — group meetings, outreach around nutrition and mental health issues for new families, interventions up to the age of 2 — that rate is significantly lower, 3.7.

“This progress is literally life and death,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who helped secure the moneyg. At a time when the national pot for maternal and child health has been cut by a third, New Haven’s grant represents a 25 percent increase, a notable achievement, she added.

Harris said the money will permit new initiatives this year. They will include addressing the impact of stress on new mothers and infants and ​“targeting men and fathers attached to the women we’re serving.”