A Close Look at Fatal Injuries in Young Kids

A new study reports good and bad news about injury-related death rates in young children in the United States. Rates for several main causes of fatal childhood injuries have decreased significantly. But more needs to be done to prevent deaths from unintentional injuries.

Researchers for the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation used nationwide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to analyze injury-related deaths among children from birth to 4 years old from 1981 to 2003. The study compared fatal injuries among white, black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic kids.

In 2003, injury was the leading cause of death in 1- to 4-year-olds across all ethnic groups. Among infants 0 to 12 months old with fatal injuries, about 90% of deaths involved drowning, motor vehicles, residential fire/burns, or suffocation.

The study emphasized other areas of concern:

• Unintentional injury fatalities were up to 1.8 times higher among black and American Indian/Alaskan Native children than white (from residential fires, suffocation, poisoning, falls, motor vehicles, and firearms).
• In 2003, firearms-related fatalities accounted for 1.6% of injury-related deaths in young children; 83.4% of these occurred in minority children, more than half of whom were black.
• Deaths from intentional (violent) injuries are up among white children, whereas there was virtually no change in those kinds of deaths for kids in other ethnic groups.
• Suffocation-related death rates (mostly in babies under 1 year) showed no sign of improvement for kids in any group and may be increasing.

But the study offered positive findings as well, including:

• an overall decrease in injury-related deaths
• significant declines in injury-related deaths from drowning, residential fire/burns, and motor vehicles across all ethnic groups

Deaths related to poisoning, once a leading killer of young kids, decreased by more than 90% since the introduction of child-resistant safety caps in the early 1970s. However, researchers noted a "troubling trend" of increased poison-related deaths among Hispanic and black children.