By Eniola Amadu
Mississippi has been forced to suspend the collection of critical maternal health data after a shakeup at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disappointed the federal division overseeing the programme.
The state health department confirmed it has stopped gathering data for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (Prams), a national survey that for nearly four decades has tracked women’s experiences before, during and after pregnancy.
The database is widely considered essential for shaping policies to improve maternal and infant health.
The disruption follows sweeping staff cuts at the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, the little-known but influential agency responsible for Prams.
Nearly 100 staff have been removed under the Trump administration’s federal worker purge, according to court filings in a lawsuit brought by Democratic-led states.
The legal challenge alleges that many of the division’s projects, including Prams, have now ground to a halt.
An unnamed CDC staffer warned in a sworn declaration that the US will likely lack reliable nationwide maternal and infant health data for the years 2024–26.
Researchers use Prams to test interventions and identify risks to mothers and babies, while states rely on its findings to secure federal funding for services to reduce infant deaths, support women’s health and assist children with special needs.
“Prams is basically the only state and national dataset that gets data every year about the health of pregnant and postpartum women and their infants,” said Rita Hamad, associate professor at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.
Mississippi officials said they were forced to cancel 2024 Prams data collection and delay the 2025 survey after receiving a “federal directive” in January. They declined to explain further but said existing data was still being analysed.
A CDC spokesperson insisted states had received funding in May to resume Prams collection this summer and that the agency “plans to support Prams data management activities” for 2024 and 2025.
Neither the CDC nor Mississippi clarified why work has stalled on the ground.
The halt comes at a precarious moment. In August, Mississippi declared a public health emergency after its infant mortality rate rose to 9.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024 – the highest level in more than a decade.
More than 3,500 babies have died before their first birthday in the state over the past 10 years.
Birth and death certificates still provide broad measures of mortality, but they do not capture the detailed information Prams collects – such as maternal access to healthcare, postpartum depression, or behaviours linked to infant outcomes.
The lawsuit claims that although some contractors attempted to continue data collection, their efforts were “unsupervised and uncoordinated”, leaving states with unusable data.
A former CDC employee told the Guardian the collapse of the division meant there was no one left to make sense of the information.
“If you don’t maintain the staff, the funding isn’t going to be effectively used,” the ex-employee said.
“Perinatal epidemiologists are not a dime a dozen. Trying to fire them and yet still maintain a healthy society for mums and babies is just not possible.”
