Veronica Castillo a candidate for city Council district 7,and also a registered nurse wonders why North Memmphis holds the title of having more infant deaths than any community in the country. If elected to replace BWARE on the council,Castillo states that she plans to address the problem. She also states that we should not be losing these precious lives. She plans to seek funding for mentoring programs for young mothers in the district, but without seeking funds from the city.
Castillo feels that with the numerous churches located within the district that They could easily donate at least $500-$1,000 for such a program that would address the self esteem and self worth of young ladies in the district. The churches could fund this program with several hundred thousand dollars allowing them to have a ministry that is needed in the communties in which they are located.
Castillo knowing that as a council member she has no control over the operation of schools in the district she would like to work with memphis City Schools in a program that could aid in this need. As a member of the 100 Black Women of Memphis she would seek to ask each woman to be a big sister to a young woman in the district.
Barbara Swearingen Holt-Ware who is a minister and newly married to a minister should have thought of this idea years ago.With her connection to the church one would think that she would already have a program such as this in place. It's time in North Memphis for a change, Its time for leadership that cares for the community and is willing to save the lives of the future of that community. With ideas like the ideas that Veronica Castillo has maybe that change will come.
Here's an article from the CA on the subject:
Special Report: Infant mortality in Memphis
Memphis ranks worst in the nation for woeful rate of infant deaths
By Aimee Edmondson
March 6, 2005
The babies are buried with a backhoe, as many as eight at a time, in homemade pine boxes.
Like a giant steel hand, the machine's claw pats the soil as it covers the tiny coffins with dirt, tucking them in one last time.
Here at the Shelby County Public Cemetery, just outside the view of Memphis's gleaming symbol of prosperity, Wolfchase Galleria, this 30-acre burial ground for the poor holds 14,000 bodies - most of them infants in graves marked only by numbers.
Caretaker Robert Savage, a gentle man with an unthinkable job, toils week after week with a modern-day plague.
Memphis has the highest infant mortality rate among the nation's 60 largest cities. Babies here die at twice the rate of the national average.
An infant dies in Shelby County every 43 hours.
In 2002, the last year statistics are available, 202 babies didn't see their first birthday - enough to fill 10 kindergarten classrooms. By comparison, there were 122 homicide victims in the city and county last year.
"Some weeks it seems like they really stack up," said Savage, a gravedigger at the Shelby County Cemetery for almost three decades.
Several Memphis ZIP codes have infant death rates higher than scores of Third World countries. North Memphis' 38108, which includes the tattered communities of Douglass and Hollywood, is deadlier for babies than Vietnam, El Salvador and Iran.
Infant mortality is the barometer of a community's ills: poverty, pollution, crime, lack of education, access to health care and safe, affordable housing.
In Memphis, the nation's infant death capital for at least a decade, efforts to confront these problems have been small and splintered.
There has been no comprehensive effort to curb the problem.
Programs have come and gone as funding has come and gone.
The region's pre-eminent pediatrician first spotted Memphis' grim statistics in the 1960s when the city had one of the highest rates in the country.
Sheldon Korones sent up a flare for help. He banged out a plea from his manual typewriter, looking for money to start a specialized nursery for the weakest, tiniest babies.
"I was showing them we're right in the middle of this holocaust," said Korones, 80, who still runs the newborn intensive care unit he started in 1968 at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis.
"Here we are 35 years later, doing the same damn thing."
Hundreds of Shelby County women get no prenatal checkups, showing up in labor at The Med's emergency room. Their babies often are whisked to Korones and his team.
They arrive with seemingly insurmountable problems, some no bigger than a can of Coke.
When the unit first opened some 20 percent of these babies didn't make it out alive. Last year it only lost 3 percent.
Thanks to medical advances infant deaths have dropped considerably in Memphis since Korones began his crusade, from 25 of every 1,000 live births in the mid-1960s to 14.2 in 2002. But he gets more premature babies than ever.
Many cities face the same demons of poverty and low education levels but have more aggressively whittled their rates.
In the early 1990s cities across the country launched public information campaigns spurred by the federal government to cut infant deaths and bring the United States' rate more in line with other industrialized countries.
Memphis never joined up.
Flo Patton, a Memphis public health nurse almost 30 years, can't explain why.
"We never did the media spots or pushed the information out into the community."
That includes even the simplest of messages: Put your baby to sleep on his back and you'll drastically cut Sudden Infant Death Syndrome .
Many Memphis women still don't know it.
In fact, far more visible is the campaign against mosquito-borne illnesses such as West Nile that killed four county residents in 2002 and one in 2003.
"It's been going on so long it's accepted," said Nancy Hardt, a University of Tennessee professor who's picked up Korones' torch in the last year.
New to Memphis, she was stunned by the numbers when she took over the Women's Institute at UT.
She heads an infant mortality committee for the Shelby County Regional Health Council, working to get a new education campaign off the ground - like the one other cities did a decade ago.
Black mothers nationwide are more than twice as likely to lose a child before age 1 than other women.
In Memphis they're almost three times more likely.
In 2002 the rate among black Memphis women was 19 for every 1,000 births; the white rate, 6.7.
"It's a tale of two cities," said Yvonne Madlock, who heads the Memphis and Shelby County Health Department. "Unless it hits you personally it's somebody else's problem."
The health department has never made infant mortality its main focus as it struggled with other urban ills.
And it shows. Memphis' infant death rate is higher than New York City and Dallas combined.
Unthinkable human cost aside, the price tag for premature birth - infant mortality's main cause - affects everyone's taxes and health insurance premiums.
In 2001 hospital stays for premature infants were estimated to cost $13.6 billion.
The federal government says the average premature baby's hospital bill is $75,000 for a 25-day stay.
For healthy newborns it's $2,000 for an average two-day stay.
The costs don't stop once the premature baby leaves the hospital.
The average lifetime medical cost has been conservatively estimated at $500,000 per child.
Mattie Anthony left her oldest daughter's bedside at The Med, where her newborn grandchild had just died, only to go home to North Memphis and find her 14-year-old pregnant.
Daughter Audrey's 2 1/2 -week stay cost $82,000, said Mattie, who also lost a baby in the 1980s.
Her child, her grandchild and even a niece are all buried in the Shelby County Cemetery.
Caretaker Savage picks up the babies from The Med every Wednesday. That's where the poorest mothers go for delivery. That's where the most babies die.
On burial days Savage parks his county-owned white Dodge Ram truck outside The Med's morgue. The pickup looks new but its bed is scratched and worn from the sliding of little coffins.
The blond caskets look like big loaves of bread, 22 inches long and 7 inches wide. This year's supply of 250 was made assembly-line style in three days by Shelby County Correction Center inmates.
At the morgue, technicians tell Savage that several babies ready for burial can't be released because the paperwork isn't finished. This is how it is many weeks. The answering machine back at his office will be clogged with grieving mothers wanting to know when he's going to bury their child.
Mourning families wait about a month for their baby's burial, The Commercial Appeal found.
One spring day Savage's answering machine blinks with 11 messages, most from mothers.
"Did you get my baby today?" a voice pleads from the speaker.
The county's public cemetery, arguably the nation's busiest, has been in the same spot since 1965, when it replaced the old potter's field on North Watkins.
"Potter's field," which refers to any public cemetery, comes from the Bible, Matthew 27:7. Priests used 30 pieces of silver to buy a burial ground for the poor. The original was a field where potters got their clay.
At a Glance
Major findings in today's installment:
An infant dies in Shelby County every 43 hours.
At least one Memphis ZIP code, 38108, is deadlier for babies than Vietnam, Iran and El Salvador.
The average premature baby's hospital bill is $75,000 for a 25-day stay. A healthy newborn costs $2,000.
Black mothers in Memphis are almost three times more likely to lose babies before age 1 than white women.
More than 60 percent of city high school students say they've had sex; nearly a third have had four partners or more.
Infant mortality rates (per 1,000 births):
ZIP code 38108: 31
Memphis: 14
Tennessee: 9
U.S.: 7
There are no tombstones here, just numbered four-inch metal disks mark the graves. On days Savage returns from The Med with babies, he painstakingly prints each infant's name and assigned number in a hefty logbook.
Attached to his office is a two-car garage. The empty, rough-hewn boxes are stored there, stacked 10 high and three deep against a wall.
Wearing blue canvas work gloves, Savage hammers the assigned numbers into the grave markers with a resounding "clack" for every digit.
Tax dollars don't pay for little lambs etched in granite as in the Babyland sections of private cemeteries.
Savage's burials take no more than 15 minutes with the backhoe. He runs the controls deftly, heaving orange clay from the hillside, digging a long trench four feet deep. Amid the smell of diesel and dirt, he carefully lines up the boxes a foot apart.
On the coffin in black ink he has written the child's last name and disk number. Rows of disks, hammered into the hillside, glitter in the sun. Savage is working his way past a Southern Red Oak toward Wolf Trace subdivision to the east.
The two-story homes of suburbia sit next to the cemetery, their backyards filled with the toys of happy, healthy children: swing sets, Little Tykes log cabins, red wagons and trampolines.
The cemetery's grave markers settle into the earth from time to time but Savage's metal detector finds them. Sometimes a family comes up with the money and exhumes their infant for a private burial, complete with headstone.
Not far from his tractor, a baseball sits next to a numbered disk and bears the scrawl of a father in pain.
"I miss and love you very much. I wish I could have used this with you. Love Dad."
Prematurity is the No. 1 baby killer in Memphis and nationwide, accounting for at least 60 percent of the deaths.
In half those cases doctors don't know why the babies came early.
Poor women are more likely to deliver too early - between 20 and 37 weeks - and lose their babies. The odds are against them.
Their lives too often reflect the long list of risk factors.
Poor mothers are less likely to get prenatal care, less likely to eat right and get vitamins they need.
They're more likely to smoke, drink, use drugs, and suffer mental and physical abuse.
They're more likely to have unplanned or back-to-back pregnancies.
Poor mothers are more often high school dropouts and teenagers, more likely to live near toxic streams and dumping grounds.
Yet it also strikes women who do everthing right, from any economic background.
The issue has largely been below the radar of local political and community leaders, leaving the medical community and health department to bear the burden.
Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton refers questions about infant mortality to the health department.
When brought to Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, he dubbed the issue "a crisis" and called for more public education about the problem, for starters.
His health policy assistant, Nancy Lawhead, says Memphis has looked for solutions in the wrong place.
"We've medicalized a social problem," she said.
Memphis must find a way to infuse in its culture that teen pregnancy is a shackle to poverty, she said. That the surest way to freedom is family planning; that low education levels and no prenatal care can literally kill your baby.
A federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study offered a troubling glimpse into the world of the Memphis teen last fall.
More than 60 percent of city high school students say they've had sex and nearly a third have had four or more partners.
Shelby County's teen pregnancy rate is down but still among the country's highest.
The public school system is as important as the medical system in the fight to slow the infant death rate.
"We need to be talking to kids in the sixth grade," said UT professor Hardt.
In Memphis, one small public school for pregnant students and teen moms enrolls about 85 girls in grades 7-12.
They learn to care for themselves and baby while taking classes toward graduation.
The county's 11 public health clinics nestled in the poorest neighborhoods see thousands of patients - many of them teens with their moms - seeking birth control and other ob-gyn services each year.
Thousands more are on Medicaid using private providers.
But last year 604 mothers got no prenatal care.
Hundreds more saw the doctor too little or too late.
At least one-third of the pregnant teens got inadequate care.
Funding for three clinics in Memphis high schools was cut two years ago.
Lawhead sees it, in part, as a money problem, that if moms won't go to the neighborhood clinics, a home health nurse should go into every pregnant mother's home to teach her how to care for herself and her baby.
But more than that, she said, efforts have been too small, disorganized and scattered.
"We're our own worst enemy."
The health department is still reeling from a setback last summer. The federal government didn't renew the county's four-year, $2 million Healthy Start grant, citing stiff competition from other cities.
The Memphis initiative sent nurses into the homes of 1,023 poor pregnant mothers. The health department reported impressive results: only two infant deaths occurred in the program.
A smattering of other programs chip away at the causes.
Like North Memphis' Porter Leath Children's Center, which sends AmeriCorps visitors into housing projects to work with young moms.
In 1998 the nonprofit's new chief, Mike Warr, revamped that two-year-old program, calling it ineffective.
He cleaned up fraud cases where workers forged documents that said they were visiting moms when they weren't.
"We've made teaspoons of progress and we needed to be making quarts," Warr said.
It's impossible to calculate how much is spent in Memphis to battle the problem - or to compare it with other cities.
Here and elsewhere, funding is a hodgepodge of federal, state, local and private dollars.
More and more, scientists say the answer lies in the months and years before a woman becomes pregnant. It's in the biological manifestation of poverty and the lifetime of stress that comes with it.
On a recent day at the county cemetery the backhoe buried Ventrel and Liquitita Baker's sons Ventre'and Vontrel.
There aren't traditional graveside services here. Savage doesn't call the families until he's put the babies in the ground and the backhoe away.
If the family wants to come out after hours he gives them their disk number over the phone and puts an orange construction flag by the grave.
Parents have brought plastic tombstones, like the one of little angels playing harps. Nearby a white wooden cross with artificial blue carnations is planted next to another disk.
Savage, who has two grown children of his own, knows families need to adorn their babies' graves so he's careful with his Weedeater.
During the day he often escorts dazed families to their babies. On this day it was another mother who grew up in Zip Code 38108, where it seems the infant death rate just won't budge.
"When you come back, just look for that tree," he tells the grieving Bakers, pointing to the oak midpasture.
"If y'all need me for anything I'll be in the office," he says before returning to his paperwork.
The mother's howls of grief are carried away on the light breeze, along with the sound of a lawn mower running on the other side of the cemetery.
This was a quiet family service with just close family.
No preacher. No tent. No chairs.
The father, a church deacon, opened a bulky black Bible and began reading Psalm 23:4: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me .''
They push red carnations into the soil and move away, mother leaning hard on father, sobbing.
"Give us peace of mind, Lord, peace in our hearts," he prays.
- Aimee Edmondson: 529-2773
City Councilman Rickey Peete resigned today from the city council a position that he has held since 1995. Peete is presently under indictment for using his political influence to help William H. Thomas get a permit for a billboard. City Councilman Edmund ford is also under indictment for the same crime.
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