One in 14 children who died in England in a four-year period had parents who were close relatives, according to “stark” figures revealed by the first study of its kind.
The figures, published by the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), based at the University of Bristol, analysed all 13,045 child deaths in England between 2019 and 2023. Of these, 926 (7%) were found to be of children born to consanguineous parents, meaning the mother and father are close blood relatives, such as first cousins.
Although the exact number of children with consanguineous
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