Weld County’s infant mortality rate is twice as high as neighboring Larimer and Boulder counties.
Melanie Cyphers works for the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment, and she specializes in infant, fetal and fertility health. As a part of her duties, she also helps run two committees of health specialists and community leaders who want to solve Weld County’s infant mortality problem. The mothers, Cyphers said, are the place to start.
Cyphers meets with mothers who lost their babies either before they were born or when they were infants. She asks them all the same questions. What were they eating? Were they smoking? Drinking? Did they get enough rest? She’s learned how to ask them in a non-judgmental way.
The information she gathers from them is important. If they didn’t agree to speak to her, the committees would have no way of establishing some kind of pattern that could hold the answer to Weld’s troubling fetal and infant death rates.
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