CDC: 91,000 babies were mistreated in ’06

More than 91,000 babies were mistreated in their first year of life in the United States in 2006, according to the first national estimate of abuse of the nation’s youngest children, prepared by federal officials on the basis of cases substantiated by state and local children’s protective services agencies.

Officials estimated that abuse killed an additional 499 children in 2006 before their first birthday.

“It is a picture that you don’t even want to imagine -- that this number of infants are being maltreated . . . in ways that are largely preventable,” said Ileana Arias of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which prepared the report.

More than a third of the nonfatal abuse occurred in the first week of life, with most involving neglect rather than purposeful physical abuse, according to the national child abuse database.

Under federal law, states since 1993 have reported all abuse cases verified by investigators. The inquiries can be triggered by suspicions raised by medical and social services personnel, law enforcement, teachers or day care providers, parents, relatives, neighbors or friends.

Because the estimate was the first attempt to examine abuse among the youngest children, officials did not know whether the number was increasing.

For the study, researchers examined data collected in fiscal 2006 from 44 states plus the District of Columbia through the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System.

A total of 905,000 children under 18 were reported to have been abused that year, including 91,278 who had not reached their first birthday, according to the analysis published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

That’s a rate of about 23 mistreated babies out of every 1,000 of the nearly 4 million infants under age 1 during the period studied.