news-record.com

North Carolina continues to do well with child immunizations, but our kids are fat and getting fatter.

Those are some of the findings in the 2008 Child Health Report Card.

The 14th annual report was issued today by the nonprofit groups Action for Children of North Carolina and the quasi-public N.C. Institute of Medicine. It compares figures from 2007 with data from the baseline year of 2002.

Among its findings:

-- The percentage of children -- those from birth through age 17 -- without health insurance increased from 11.6 percent in 2002 to 13.1 percent in 2007.

-- The state continues to do a good job of ensuring that children receive proper vaccinations and has significantly increased the percentage of children up to 2 years old who have received the immunizations, from 69.7 percent in 2002 to 77.3 percent in 2007.

-- Teen pregnancy has dropped but remains high, at 34.8 pregnancies per 1,000 girls ages 15-17.

-- The percentage of low income children who are overweight remains unacceptably high and growing, particularly in the 12-18 age group, in which nearly a third of children are overweight or obese.