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 Seven states in Appalachia and the Southwest, for example, had
unintentional firearms deaths roughly two to four times the national
average, researchers report in the journal Injury Prevention.
At the same time, five states on the West Coast had rates of what’s
known as legal intervention deaths – when police kill someone or
officers are killed in the line of duty – up to 3.5 times higher
than the U.S. average.
“States might have different rates of injury deaths because methods
of classifying injury deaths vary by state, because some states have
geographic characteristics or industries that make certain types of
injury deaths more likely, or because of differences in policy and
culture,” said lead study author Sara Heins, a researcher at Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
“When a state has high death rates due to this last category, to me
it highlights a target for prevention efforts,” Heins added by
email.
To assess injury death rates by state, Heins and colleagues mined
data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for
injuries in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 2004 to
2013.
They compared average death rates in each state to national averages
to discern the most unique causes of fatalities in different parts
of the country.
Fires and homicides were higher than average in Michigan, for
example, while machinery accidents were unusually common causes of
death in Iowa.
Drowning and suicide were more typical than the national average in
New Jersey, while bicycle and vehicle deaths stood out in Florida.
Nature played an outsize role in fatalities in Oklahoma and Wyoming.
Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska had unusually high death rates
from motor vehicle crashes.
The states with higher than average rates of unintentional firearms
deaths were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina,
Tennessee and West Virginia. None of these places are among the 18
states with legislation on the safe storage of guns, also known as
child access prevention laws, the researchers note.
States with unusually high rates of fatalities involving
interactions with police were California, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico
and Utah. While these data on these deaths isn’t always accurate,
one previous study of fatalities from 2010 to 2014 found these five
states accounted for almost one third of so-called legal
intervention deaths in the U.S. even though they only make up 16
percent of the population.
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Often, injury rates are relatively high compared to the national
average but still account for a small number of fatalities, the
researchers note.
Other limitations of the study include the potential for states to
inconsistently record data on causes of injuries or fatalities as
well as overly broad categories for some types of deaths, the
authors add. For example, drug overdose records don’t distinguish
between prescription medications and illegal narcotics.
Still, the data may offer states a road map for injury or fatality
prevention, said Dr. Eric Fleegler, a specialist in emergency
medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital who wasn’t involved in the
study.
Some states, for example, have high gun ownership and high gun
fatality rates, while other states with a lot of gun owners don’t
have as many deaths related to firearms, Fleegler said by email.
“Even though there may be high levels of gun ownership in your
community, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make efforts to prevent
deaths,” Fleegler said.
This kind of regional variation in injury or death rates can
highlight the idea that the risk of harm from different sources can
depend on where people live.
“That’s a call to public health and medical organizations to say,
'hey, we need legislation and campaigns that speak to this,'”
Fleegler added.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1LTfFHc Injury Prevention, published online
January 24, 2016.
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