Faith Healing Blamed for Child Fatalities.

• Position: Brief Article

More than 81% of children who died because their parents didn't seek medical care for religious reasons would have had better than a 90% chance of survival, according to a study by researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD), Sioux City, Iowa. They reviewed reports of 172 child fatalities in faith-healing sects and discovered that 140 deaths were caused by conditions that are known to have a survival rate exceeding 90% with medical care; 18 more would have had expected survival rates of more than 50%; and all but three of the youngsters studied would have benefited from some medical treatment.

They found that, in most cases, symptoms were obvious and prolonged, as they were in the case of a two-year-old girl who choked on a bite of banana and showed signs of life for nearly an hour while her parents' only response was to call members of their religious circle to pray. In other examples, a two-year-old boy died with a tumor that had grown to one-sixth the size of his body mass, and a 12-year-old girl was kept out of school for seven...