Technical Report - Donegal Traveller's Project

All Ireland Traveller Health StudyCommentaryThe AITHS surveyed specific age groups of children (5, 9 and 14-year-olds) because comparable Irishdata on these ages were available. The following comparisons are drawn from three sources of dataon Irish children: for the 5-year-olds: the 5-year-old children of the medical card holders in Lifeways; forthe 9-year-old: the Middle Childhood Study of children aged 9-10 from the HBSC 2006 study (Kelly etal., 2008) and the 9-year-old survey from the NLSC/GUI (focusing on the children in social class 5 and 6where possible); and for the 14-year-olds: the HBSC 2006 data on 12-14-year-olds. Infant birth weightas described in the AITHS and Lifeways studies is shown in Table 6. In the 2007 Irish Perinatal statistics(ESRI, 2009), 68.7% of newborn infants weighed between 3 and 4 kg. ROI Travellers had a higherprevalence of low birth weight infants than did the general population.Table 245: Birth weight of the survey childInfant weightTraveller (ROI)(n=1,223)Traveller (NI)(n=157)Lifeways medicalcard(n=188)ESRI 2007 nationalperinatal statistics(n=69,318)