In a report you paid for, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finds that births in the Gulf Coast areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina “plunged” during the year following the storm. Hmm… Wonder if that could that have been because not many people lived there during the year after the storm?
That’s pretty much the conclusion of the CDC’s report, The Effect of Hurricane Katrina: Births in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region, Before and After the Storm, which examines birth certificates for the 12 months before Katrina and the 12 months following the Aug. 28, 2005 storm, and covers residents in the 91 FEMA-designated counties and parishes of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
“For example, the number of younger people and African Americans in the FEMA-designated parishes of Louisiana declined substantially…” declares the report. “Some women who left the New Orleans area may have relocated to other parts of Louisiana or to Alabama or Mississippi, thus affecting the statistical portrait of the childbearing population in these areas.”
Amazingly, the CDC also determined that in those other parts of Louisiana, Alabama or Mississippi to which Katrina victims relocated, birth rates actually went up after the storm.
You know, based on this report, you can almost predict that as people move back into the Katrina-devastated areas, birth rates there will increase. But don’t worry; the CDC is already planning another report on that.
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