Issue 17 - Racism and child health
- Delan
- Apr 7
- 2 min read
Welcome to Quarterly 2025!
We hope you are all keeping well, and safe.This year Quarterly will focus on child health (from preconception to adolescents). This has been a key theme of our work from the start but is now a focus area with our upcoming Lancet commission.
Why should we care about racism and children? On a very basic level, children are both directly and indirectly affected by racism. Yet the health-related conversations tend to focus on adults. We want to address this imbalance. As I assume you know, racism leads to inequities in health outcomes, but there are two inequities here. As described in our recent article, children around the world already face a huge number of adversities. Each year around 6.7 million children and adolescents die, and another 2 million are born dead (stillbirths). The vast majority of these deaths are preventable.
Can I urge you to dwell on that fact for a moment. This in itself is grossly unjust. But if we look at who it is who dies, we see a double injustice. Both mortality and morbidity rates are higher amongst minoritised groups across the world. In addition to any immediate impact on children, there is also a long-term one. Childhood has sensitive periods in which stresses linked to racism can lead to altered biological responses, resulting in ill health many years later.
In the next four editions of Quarterly, we will have the same mix of articles, but with a focus on children around the world. We hope you will like them and will find something useful. Please do get in touch with us if you’d like to contribute or if you have suggestions for what we should do.
New From Race & Health
The Race & Health Podcast recently teamed up with PMNCH Touchpoint for a one-off episode on racism and child health. You listen to the podcast here, or watch the video recording of our session on PMNCH Touchpoint's YouTube channel, here.
Racism and health inequity: a global syndemic for children—the Lancet Commission on racism and child health, our Lancet commission commentary piece is now availble to read. Read it here.