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PRESS RELEASE
DR. MARIO MARAZZI‐SANTIAGO
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

April 25, 2018

INSTITUTE OF STATISTICS ORDERS PUBLICATION OF MORTALITY DATA

The decision of the Board of Directors paves the way for greater transparency to save lives after future hurricanes in Puerto Rico and supports ongoing efforts to review the number of deaths as a result of Hurricane Maria.

The Institute of Statistics of Puerto Rico (Institute) announced today the approval of a series of methodological standards that must be used to measure the number of fatalities from future natural disasters in Puerto Rico, as well as to produce final estimates of the number of deaths as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a process that still remains incomplete today.

The methodological standards approved by the Institute's Board of Directors include: (1) the need to conduct a case-level epidemiological study to comprehensively measure the number of fatalities from any natural disaster, (2) the sources of information that should be used for this type of epidemiological study, (3) the criteria that will be used to attribute a specific death to a natural disaster, and (4) the set of mortality data that must be published online and updated daily.

The rules were approved in the Resolution No. 2018-03 of the Institute's Board approved this week. The Resolution also orders PRIS staff to take all necessary actions permitted under the Institute Enabling Act to ensure that these methodological standards are adopted and implemented by the Government of Puerto Rico.

For example, under the Resolution No. 2018-03, PRIS expert staff and financial resources are available to ensure that an exhaustive case-level epidemiological study is carried out to complete the review of the number of fatalities from Hurricane Maria. In addition, the Resolution requires that any epidemiological study of cases of disaster-related mortality in Puerto Rico be able to take advantage of information from the following sources: death certificates, medical records, forensic pathology files and the testimony of family members.

In addition, the Resolution adopts the criteria and classification structure developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for the attribution of a specific death to a natural disaster. These criteria are described in the Reference guide for the certification of deaths in the event of a natural, human-induced or chemical/radioactive disaster.

Finally, the Resolution describes the specific data fields that must be published and updated daily for each death on the Puerto Rico Open Data Portal:
https://data.pr.gov/. To do this, the Institute will use its authority, which includes powers such as subpoena, to request the necessary set of data from the Puerto Rico Health Department on a daily basis. The Institute will also be available to train staff from the Puerto Rico Department of Health, so that they can upload the necessary data sets themselves.

“As the next hurricane season approaches, we must work to ensure that Puerto Rico's data infrastructure is better prepared to inform our citizens and the world about conditions in Puerto Rico. In the case of mortality, allowing people on the other side of the world to see our latest death records allows scientists around the world to analyze our data, even when there is no electricity or Internet in Puerto Rico, to identify patterns that can save lives in a timely manner. We owe it to the hundreds, if not the thousands, of people who died as a result of Hurricane Maria, so that we never allow this to happen again,” said Dr. Mario Marazzi-Santiago, executive director of the Institute.

Currently, the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety attributes only 64 deaths to Hurricane Maria. In December, after several independent researchers discovered that the number of fatalities from Hurricane Maria could be more than a thousand, the Government of Puerto Rico ordered a review of Maria's death toll and stopped providing the public with monthly mortality totals.

The Resolution of the Institute's Board explicitly recognizes that in the 3 months following the passage of hurricanes Irma and María over Puerto Rico, there were higher-than-average deaths in Puerto Rico, amounting to more than a thousand, and that this increase in deaths is probably related to the passage of hurricanes Irma and María over Puerto Rico. The resolution also aims to support the work of a group of independent researchers from George Washington University who were hired by the Government of Puerto Rico to analyze various issues related to mortality after Hurricane Maria.

The Institute's Board had been carefully analyzing and considering the approval of this Resolution, after it was able to restart its work last month. Previously, he had not been able to meet, even before hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico, due to a legal dispute that arose last summer, after the Governor tried to dismiss several members of the Institute's Board of Directors without due process. The dispute was finally resolved in the first instance last month, following a court ruling that the Governor lacked authority to dismiss Board members without due process.

The Puerto Rico Statistics Institute is an autonomous governmental entity responsible for coordinating the Government's statistical production service to ensure that the data collection and statistics systems, on which public policies are based, are complete, reliable, and have quick and universal access. The Institute has in its inventory, accessible through https://estadisticas.pr.gov/, about 300 statistical products. In addition, it is a custodian and provides access to over 100 data sets or “data sets” through https://data.pr.gov/ and to over 40 tables and more than 6 thousand indicators through: https://www.indicadores.pr/.

In addition, as the leading entity of Puerto Rico's SDC, the Institute manages the SDC portal, which contains the main statistical reports and publications of the U.S. Census Bureau on Puerto Rico, specifically those that are most in demand, such as annual population estimates; the Puerto Rico Community Survey and official statistics on Puerto Rico's decennial population and housing censuses, among others. The Puerto Rico SDC portal can be accessed through: https://censo.estadisticas.pr/.

For more information you can visit our website: https://estadisticas.pr.gov/. In addition, you can follow us on social networks through Facebook accounts (statistics.pr), Twitter (@EstadisticasPR) and LinkedIn (Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics).

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Press Contact: Sandra Morales Blanes/ (787) 688-0401

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PRESS RELEASE

Updated data on child abuse in Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile: Interactive Report 2018-2022, shows, among others, the number of abused minors per year and the magnitude of the types of abuse

The executive director of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics, Dr. Orville M. Disdier, presented the “Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile: Interactive Report 2018-2022”, which consists of a new digital platform through which statistics related to child abuse are organized and summarized, based on secondary data provided by various local agencies and the federal government. Available statistics include the number of abused minors per year, the rates of abuse, the geographical distribution of abuse, the distribution and magnitude of the types of abuse, the ratio of the perpetrator, and the contrast between Puerto Rico and other jurisdictions in the United States.

“Child abuse is a serious social problem that negatively affects the physical, mental and emotional health and integrity of children and young people under 18 years of age. To eradicate this problem, it is essential to have complete and accessible statistics that serve as a guide for evidence-based prevention and promotion programs. Precisely, this new profile provides the necessary information and statistics to start implementing solutions,” said Dr. Disdier.

Disdier explained that this profile not only fills an information gap that existed since the previous publication, which dates back to 2015, but now the report is a digital and interactive one, in which the user can select between several years, categories and variables, and can even download the data for subsequent analysis. “These new data suggest that, in general terms, more than 5,000 children are abused annually and that currently the rate of abuse can be estimated at 10 abused minors for every 1,000 children under 18 living in Puerto Rico,” said Disdier.

Among other more relevant data presented by this new profile, for the year 2021, are:

• The municipalities with the highest rates (x 1,000 minors) of child abuse in Puerto Rico in 2021 were: Ceiba (31.8), Humacao (23.3), Jayuya (21.7), Lajas (21.7) and Guayama (20.6).
• The municipalities with the lowest rates (x 1,000 minors) of child abuse in Puerto Rico in 2021 were: Loíza (2.3), Florida (2.3), Lares (2.9), Naranjito (3.7), Morovis (3.7) and Culebra (3.7).
• The three most prevalent types of abuse are: neglect (32.5%), emotional neglect (32.3%) and educational neglect (14.8%).
• In general terms, both boys and girls are abused in equal proportions, although in terms of sexual abuse, girls are abused in a greater proportion (male, 18.4% and female, 81.6%).
• Regarding the relationship between the child and the perpetrators, in most cases the biological mother and/or the biological father are the ones who commit the abuse.

The profile is nourished by secondary data based on data from the Department of the Family, the Puerto Rico Police, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Disdier mentioned that the collaboration of the Department of the Family has been, and continues to be, key to developing this new tool.

In this regard, the Secretary of the Department of the Family, Dr. Carmen Ana González, explained that “The Department of the Family team has worked to reinforce and create new strategies that focus on preventing and educating the population so that together they can combat violence in all its forms. This new platform will present a broader picture of the situation of abuse suffered by minors on the island. The fight against abuse is a matter of co-responsibility; it is a joint fight where all sectors come together, thus creating a front that ensures the well-being of populations that are in situations of vulnerability. In this way, we develop prevention tools focused on geographical areas and typology. This is a shared task that requires coordination between all components to be effective and we, in Familia, are embedded in it.”

The Institute's statistical project manager, Dr. Francisco Pesante, together with his team, was in charge of the technical development of this interactive profile. “The data presented reflect the complexity of interagency efforts to address child abuse as a social problem. We hope that the continuity in the publication and analysis of these data will contribute to the best government service in administrative and judicial instances to protect the physical and mental health of children and young people in Puerto Rico,” Pesante argued.

The Puerto Rico Child Abuse Profile resides on the website of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics and interested parties can access it at any time through the following e-mail address: Child Abuse Profile.

For technical questions about this tool, you can send an email to: preguntas@estadisticas.pr.

About the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics

To learn more about the Institute of Statistics, you can access the website: www.estadisticas.pr.gov. On social media through Facebook accounts (@statistics.pr), Twitter (@EstadisticasPR), Instagram (@institutodeestadisticas) and LinkedIn (Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics).

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