The Mississippi Department of Health declared a public health emergency Thursday on the rise in the state’s infant mortality rate.

According to a news release from the state health department, 9.7 deaths occurred for every 1,000 births in Mississippi in 2024, with the highest incidence in over a decade. More than 3,500 babies in Mississippi have died since 2014 before the age of one year.

“The losses for all infants represent families being devastated, communities being affected, and shortened futures. We cannot accept these figures as reality. We declare that a public health emergency is more than a policy decision.

An emergency declaration creates specific opportunities for mobilizing resources to address issues. The state’s health department’s strategies include activating standardized systems of maternal and infant care, eliminating the desert of obstetric care, expanding access to mothers and babies resources through community healthcare programs and home visits; Education on safe sleep practices.

“Improved maternal health is the best way to reduce infant mortality,” Edney said. “It means better access to prenatal and postnatal care, greater community support, and more resources for mothers and babies. Healthy women of birth age are more likely to have a healthy pregnancy, which leads to healthy babies.”

About a third of U.S. counties don’t have a single obstetric clinician, according to a report released last year by Dimes, a nonprofit for infant and maternal health. In Mississippi, nearly half of all counties are considered maternity care deserts, according to the organization.

“The Mississippi Department of Health’s public health emergency declaration in response to infant mortality is a painful reminder of the maternal and infant health crisis our country faces,” Dimes President and CEO Cindy Rahman said in a statement. “While Mississippi accounts for less than 1% of US births, the state accounts for more than 1.6% of all infant deaths. These losses should be a call for awakening to the nation.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will release its own data on infant mortality later this year, but the Mississippi Health Department said “we were unable to wait for the urgency of this crisis to take action.”

Latest available data from the CDC shows that the national infant mortality rate rose in 2022 for the first time in 20 years. Mississippi had the highest infant mortality rate in all 50 states that year, more than 60% higher than the national average.

According to a state news release, the main causes of infant mortality in Mississippi are congenital malformations, premature birth, low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Black babies in Mississippi are particularly vulnerable, with over 15 deaths per 1,000 births in 2024, already jumping 24% in a year, above average fees.

Recent studies have shown that there are several possible relationships between infant mortality and abortion restrictions. CNN’s investigation report found infant mortality rates skyrocketed in Texas after the six-week abortion ban was enacted in 2021, and a survey released in October found that the impact of the ban and restrictions enacted by the U.S. Supreme Court DOBBS has been large enough to make the US DOBBS decision to significantly abolish federal rights.

March of Dimes also highlighted the “important” importance of protecting Medicaid to support the health care of newborns and their mothers.

“Medicaid has become an important lifeline for moms and babies, covering nearly 53% of Mississippi’s births and 40% nationwide. “The United States is one of the most dangerous developing countries for births. We can’t afford to retreat.”

A newly published report shows that the lungs of a genetically modified pig were brain-deadly implanted and functioned for nine days.

There has been recent success in transplanting pig kidneys and hearts into humans, and this is considered to be the first attempt to transplant pig lungs into humans. Doctors hope that one day this will become an option for people in need of organs, but experts say it won’t be time soon.

The authors of the first affiliated hospital at Guangzhou Medical University in Ching did not identify patients in the study, but he is said to be a 39-year-old man who was declared brain dead after a cerebral hemorrhage. After obtaining consent from the man’s family, the doctor implanted a pig’s lungs into his body. The findings were published in Nature Medicine on Monday.

With human-to-human or animal-to-human transplants (also known as xenografts), doctors carefully monitor infection and rejection.

Patients were given several medications to reduce the risk of infection and rejection. The lungs themselves were also undergoing six gene editing, and donor pigs were kept in very clean and strictly controlled areas throughout their lifetimes.

In this study, researchers reported that they did not see any immediate signs of rejection after implantation, but found problems one day later.

A blood flow problem caused extensive swelling throughout the man’s body, as a liquid potentially accumulated in his tissues. In addition to helping a person breathe, the lungs play a role in blood circulation.

There were some signs of partial recovery a few days after the transplant, but despite all caution, the doctor saw signs that the man’s body was beginning to reject his organs.

At the request of the man’s family, the doctors completed the experiment.

“This study shows the feasibility of xenografting of the lungs from pigs to humans, but there remain substantial challenges associated with organ rejection and infection,” the researchers write in a new study. They concluded that more research is needed before the treatment can be repeated again in clinical trials.

The world needs donated organs. In the US alone in 2023, all organ transplant wait lists were twice as many times complete.

Last year there was more 48,000 transplants In the US, over 103,000 people were on the waiting list. Approximately 13 According to the Federal Agency for Health Resources and Services, or the HRSA, people in the United States die every day waiting for a transplant.

Pig valves have been implanted in humans for the past 30 years. Although organs are difficult, doctors have seen limited success with genetically modified pig hearts and pig kidneys. They also experimented with genetically modified pig livers, but at least so far less successful.

The most successful so far is Tim Andrews of Massachusetts, who lives with the kidneys of a genetically modified pig that was transplanted at Massachusetts General Hospital in January.

Experts say there are ways to go before pig lung transplants show many success.

“No one will sign up for a nine-day lung transplant,” said Dr. Adam Grisemer, a transplant surgeon who is a senior member of the xenotransplant team at NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute, who was not involved in the new study.

Griesemer said in previous experiments that pig lung transplants into other animals showed similar results.

“I think it’s very important to do these studies because we can’t assume that animal models fully reflect what happens to human recipients,” Griesmer said.

Chinese researchers said some have conducted the study because of the “transformational potential” of xenotransplants.

Dr. Ankit Bharat, director of the Northwest Medical Canned Chest Research Institute, found the study interesting, but added that he believes that pig-to-human lung transplants will not occur anytime soon.

“We will learn something from now on, but we are not entirely sure this opens the door to truly bringing to great challenges.

Lungs are much more complicated to transplant than organs like kidneys, he said.

The lungs play an important role in hemofiltration, temperature regulation, platelet production, pH balance, and immune defense, and have metabolic and endocrine functions. Also, unlike the kidneys and heart, the lungs are exposed to external elements such as viruses and bacteria.

They are so large and covered with proteins that aid in immune defense, it is difficult to avoid the body’s instincts to reject something foreign, even if you have a lung transplant from another person, Bharat said.

“It’s a difficult problem to solve. Even human organs don’t really solve it,” he said. “So we’re just adding another complex layer of pig antigens that could become another problem.”

Researchers behind the new study suggested that the male body showed no signs of immediate rejection of the pig’s lungs, but Bharat is less sure after seeing the shared x-ray and CT images.

“There’s a lot of damage,” Bharat said. “I’m not sure if I’m completely certain there’s no superacute rejection.”

Bharat believes that advances in the use of human stem cells than transplants can be promising, at least when it comes to lung transplantation.

Griesemer said that stem cell therapy can be used to replace human cells with pig cells, as well as stem cell therapy, as well as studies that use pig lungs as scaffolds.

“In a sense, the cells are human, but the structure is from pigs, so it’s not actually a xenograft,” Griesmer said. “It’s another possibility for people who need a lung transplant, how medical technology can solve this problem.”

Recent advances in cloning and gene editing have led a small number of institutions to better understand infection control and to breakthroughs in transplanting other pig organs.