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More than a year after state officials declared a public health emergency over rising infant mortality rates, eyes are on Mississippi, and Dr. Dan Edney, state health officer, said the national media attention has helped the cause.
“The narrative switched from ‘Poor old Mississippi, they’re so pitiful, they can’t keep their babies alive’ to ‘Oh my goodness, look what Mississippi is doing,’” Edney said. “We’re the only state that’s ever declared one.”
In 2025, an infant mortality report showed Mississippi’s infant mortality rate rose from 8.9 in 2023 to 9.7 in 2024 – nearly twice the national average. Edney then declared the emergency status, which he said has helped his agency cut through red tape to roll out new programs. But state and national stakeholders say more could be done when it comes to transparency and solutions.
In an interview with Mississippi Today, Edney outlined four initiatives he said his department launched or expanded since the declaration:
In December 2025, the state Health Department launched the Saving the Smallest campaign around safe sleep. To date, Edney said department employees have distributed 680 cribs and taught hundreds of families safe sleep practices during home visits.
In May, the Legislature approved the creation of a Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee, which first met in August and needs about $150,000 annually to keep running, Edney said.
The state Health Department continues to build its obstetric system of care, designed to streamline hospital transfers for high-risk pregnancies by modeling the trauma system. Hospitals are currently being surveyed and will receive designations in the coming months for the level of care they’re equipped to handle, Edney said.
The agency is restructuring its county health departments. In 2025, Edney cut services at some county clinics following insufficient funding from the Legislature. Now, Edney said he is working to offer perinatal care at some of those clinics. He said the agency would start with four or five counties, but did not say which ones.
Some public health researchers in the state were surprised to learn that the state Health Department characterized its response to the emergency as this four-pronged approach. Mitchell Adcock, executive director at the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, said his team had heard about these initiatives, but didn’t know their status.
“With a public health emergency, I just thought we would know a bit more about what’s been going on,” he said.
Meanwhile, provisional numbers for 2025 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show infant mortality in Mississippi went down from 9.7 in 2024 to 8.4. Most of the department’s new initiatives don’t overlap with those 2025 numbers. The crib distribution began in December 2025. Edney said he couldn’t take credit for that decrease and can’t say what accounts for it, but called it a “substantial reduction.”
“It’s about 40, 45 babies who survived 2025 who would not have survived 2024,” Edney said.
Once the official data is released, Adcock said his team will start digging into what’s driving those numbers.
The Fetal-Infant Mortality Review Committee has already shed light on hidden problems, Edney said. Within a couple of meetings, the committee identified several infant deaths resulting from one twin rolling over the other while sleeping, Edney said.
“The pediatricians hadn’t thought about it, the neonatalogists hadn’t thought about it. But the FIMR identified it,” Edney said. “So right there, boom, in just a few months, it was a gamechanger.”
‘counties where there is nothing’
Jonathan Webb, CEO of the national Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, said he believes the emergency designation was appropriate “given where Mississippi ranks.” He thinks states with similar rankings could collectively prioritize the challenge and share what works.
“It creates awareness and brings some visibility to the issue,” Webb said. “But it also makes it easier to direct funds to programs.”
Webb said while the declaration is commendable, Mississippi’s plan lacks certain elements he would hope to see in an emergency response, such as a focus on equity. In 2024, nearly twice as many Black infants as white ones died in Mississippi.
Data from Mississippi’s most recent infant mortality report shows the death rate for white infants in 2024 was one of the lowest over the last decade. But during that same period, the number of deaths among Black infants reached its highest rate.
“I really think that an honest assessment of our biases individually and as a system has to happen,” Webb said.
Solutions could include the health department partnering with community organizations that serve women of color, creating patient advisory committees and embedding accountability offices into health spaces, he said.
Webb also highlighted the importance of providing resources and training to clinicians who might be left picking up the slack when hospitals shutter their labor and delivery units.
“When you have these maternity care deserts and services leave communities, people are still having babies in these communities,” Webb said. “It just falls to the EMS team or the emergency room teams or critical care units, nurses who are in those environments.”
The University of Mississippi Medical Center has a program called STORK, which trains first responders and emergency room clinicians to better respond to obstetric emergencies. In 2022, UMMC doctors launched the program in response to the dwindling options for obstetric care and the concern that a growing number of women would be delivering babies outside dedicated labor and delivery units. Part of the obstetric system of care involves amplifying that effort, Edney said.
That’s not a bad thing to do, but it’s not a comprehensive approach, said Getty Israel, founder of a Jackson-based women’s health clinic called Sisters in Birth.
“Is the state doing enough? No,” Israel said, adding that she doesn’t believe the department can shore up meaningful improvements without more funding.
For the third consecutive year, the health department requested no increase in funding from lawmakers during legislative budget hearings earlier this month.
On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Fund released a new report highlighting the importance of midwifery-led birth centers, cost-effective clinical spaces outside hospitals where low-risk women can safely give birth with fewer interventions and more hands-on support. Mississippi has none.
Israel has been trying to open the state’s first birth center for nearly six years. Several state laws have stood in her way, she said, including expensive monthly fees certified nurse midwives are required to pay physicians to practice within their scope.
A willingness from lawmakers to break the status quo, and to fund the construction of more community health spaces, “could reduce so much of the risk that women experience that leads to death,” she said.
Nearly half the state’s counties are maternity care deserts, where there are no obstetric clinicians or birthing facilities, according to the March of Dimes. There should be more of a focus on shrinking those deserts by offering more reproductive health services, Israel said, than on routing women out of those deserts.
“We need to build infrastructure in those counties where there is nothing,” Israel said. “You’re relying on an EMS system to drive how many minutes, how many miles, to get to a woman’s house in a rural place?”
