UNINTENTIONAL INJURY IN CHILDREN
“If a disease were killing our children at the rate that unintentional injuries are, the public would be outraged and demand that this killer be stopped.” – C. Everett Koop, M.D.
Violent and unintentional injuries are the most significant health issue facing children today yet public outrage is absent. As a result, proven solutions go unused and thousands of children die each year. Injuries remain the leading cause of death in children ages 1-19 years. In 1996 alone 13,000 deaths were reported as a result of unintentional injury. These deaths are primarily motor vehicle injuries, drownings and residential fires. All totaled, this results in 250 deaths per week, 37 deaths per day.
Although the majority of these injuries occur among middle or upper middle class whites, poor and minority children experience higher injury rates. In the disenfranchised groups they simply have poorer access to car seats, bike helmets and smoke detectors which seem less important than other necessities. The Center for Childhood Safety’s charge is to bring rigorous intervention strategies and effective existing information into prevention programs such as our established Safe Kids programming and Safety Town. Focusing on strategies to improve the use of car seats, the wearing of bike helmets and the installation of smoke detectors could reduce yearly death rates by one third. In real numbers that would represent 4,000 of 1996’s 13,000 total deaths and twenty times that number of non-fatal injuries that would have been prevented. That’s 80,000 injuries for one year alone!
Means are available to prevent thousands of children from suffering death and disability. Multiple strategies have been well established and information is available for those prevention strategies that fit with each approach, evidence is available to demonstrate their effectiveness and strategies are adaptable for each community environment. These approaches are available through the Center for Childhood Safety and our partnership with Safe Kids Worldwide.
Why should the greater Green Bay area bother about unintentional injuries? The answer lies in the magnitude of the problem both absolutely and relative to other childhood illness. Ninety percent of childhood injuries can be prevented. The term accident implies an unpredictable unfortunate circumstance resulting in morbidity or mortality. However, accidents are in reality unintentional injury, which is preventable since it can be analyzed and averted and with proper skilled training children can learn to play safely. Injury continues to account for two thirds of all deaths in children from ages 1 – 19. In fact, unintentional injury accounts for more deaths yearly than homicide, suicide, congenital anomalies, cancer, heart disease, respiratory illness and HIV combined. More than half of the total deaths occur in the adolescent population between ages 15 – 19 years as they experience a higher frequency of motor vehicle injuries in large part related to driver inexperience, alcohol and distraction by other teens in the car.
Younger children by comparison experience more than half of their total deaths from drowning, suffocations and motor vehicle occupant injuries. Ages 5 – 14 years show primary injury deaths secondary to motor vehicle occupant injuries and pedestrian/bike-motor vehicle injuries. Although total death incident is substantial, estimates suggest for every death there are an additional 18 hospitalizations and 233 ER visits per death. This represents 40% of all emergency room visits yearly. Costs of unintentional injuries is one billion dollars spent yearly in direct resource costs, 14 billion in medical spending and 66 billion yearly in present and future work loss due to death or disability.
With safety programs, education and legislation injury death rates in the United States have fallen 40% in the last 20 years. This represents nearly 10,000 fewer deaths per year mostly pertaining to reductions in adolescent deaths and disability and younger children poisonings. This success alone far exceeds accomplishments achieved in most childhood diseases over the same period of time. U.S. injury rates are still much higher than other countries. As example, the United Kingdom’s injury rate of 8.6 per 100,000 population is approximately half the United States percentage of 17.5 per 100,000. If we were able to achieve Britain’s injury experience it would reduce our death rate by 6,291 deaths per year! As impressive as these numbers are, they still are unable to account for injury’s effect on parents, family and society. Clearly, however, one quickly grasps why it is important to invest in injury prevention.
The Center for Childhood Safety hopes this introduction to the scope of unintentional childhood injuries helps you make an informed decision regarding investing in our children’s futures. As our data demonstrates, selected injury prevention measures saved children’s lives and substantial dollars spent by all of us in direct and indirect payment for medical care, societal costs and the many other intangibles that result from injury. We hope together we can improve the quality of our community and put our energy and resources toward injury solutions with the enthusiasm that that is given to other worthy medical concerns that impact our community.