Why history matters for quantitative target setting: Long-term trends in socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequities in US infant death rates (1960-2010).

ABSTRACT: Policy-oriented population health targets, such as the Millennium Development Goals and national targets to address health inequities, are typically based on trends of a decade or less. To test whether expanded timeframes might be more apt, we analyzed 50-year trends in US infant death rates (1960-2010) jointly by income and race/ethnicity. The largest annual per cent changes in the infant death rate (between -4 and -10 per cent), for all racial/ethnic groups, in the lowest income quintile occurred between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, and in the second lowest income quintile between the mid-1960s and 1973. Since the 1990s, these numbers have hovered, in all groups, between -1 and -3 per cent. Hence, to look back only 15 years (in 2014, to 1999) would ignore gains achieved prior to the on

SUBMITTER: Krieger N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4711344 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature