By Zach Potter
The Sanford Herald
On average, a baby born in Lee County will live to about 77 years old, which is 4.6 fewer years than a baby born in Orange County about 45 miles away, according to recently released data gathered by NC Child.
“We’re seeing these gaps and disparities in life expectancy across the state by geography and location,” said Laila Bell, director of research and data at NC Child, a statewide organization that advances public policies aimed at improving child health. “[Those disparities are] a proxy for communities’ abilities to support children’s abilities to be healthy.”
NC Child’s study found that the average life expectancy for a child born in Lee County is 77.1 years. For children born in Chatham, Harnett and Moore counties, the average life expectancy is 81.6, 79.9 and 77.1 respectively. Orange County had the highest life expectancy in the state at 81.7.
NC Child examined data on “life expectancy indicators” for Lee County’s 15,000 children under the age of 18 to determine the prevalence of children born with low birth weights, mothers who received late or no prenatal care and children living in poverty or without health insurance.
For Lee County, Bell said about one in nine children (10.4 percent) are born to a mother who received very late or no prenatal care, which she said often is tied to a lack of insurance. Bell said about one in 14 children (6.9 percent) in Lee County is uninsured.
Lee County Nursing Director Pam Ridenhour added that families and children who lack insurance are less likely to go to the doctor for regular checkups, instead waiting until they faced serious health problems.
“If you have someone who doesn’t have medical insurance,” she said, “unless they seek out care somewhere that will provide it for free, most will delay going into care until it winds up being an emergency situation that causes them to go to the emergency room. That is very expensive.”
As for birth weight, Bell said it is one of the strongest predictors of infant mortality, and Ridenhour agreed that a low birth weight could lead to many problems for children. NC Child found that one in 12 children (8.1 percent) in Lee County is born at a low birth weight, which is comparable to the national average. Babies weighing less than 5.5 pounds are considered to have a low birth weight.
“Sometimes, low birth weight can be because a child is born prematurely,” Ridenhour said. “That can have a lot of impacts on a child’s development. [Children born prematurely] are more at risk for developmental delays. A lot of them might have difficulty with speech development or motor coordination. For many of those children, it can be a lifelong issue.”
The other “major indicators” for life expectancy that Bell discussed were poverty and food insecurity levels. NC Child’s study found that one in four children (26.7 percent) in Lee County lives in poverty, and 27 percent are food insecure.
“Children who live in food-insecure households,” Bell said, “those households are more likely to live in poverty. Those families have to rely on low-cost foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value, and those kids are far more likely to be obese.”
NC Child also offered a number of suggestions that could help improve life expectancies for children across the state, including expanding Medicaid at the state level to insure more children and improving and supporting local efforts to provide more pre-natal and post-natal resources to children and mothers.
“The data are sobering, but they are not intractable issues,” Bell said. “When policymakers and local communities come together to focus on issues, they can really move the needle on some of these indicators of child health.”