Posted on 07/01/2002 1:17:02 PM PDT by Pharmboy
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Nearly one third of deaths among US children under age 18 were tragedies that might have been avoided, Arizona researchers report.
"Many child deaths are preventable," study co-author Dr. William Marshall, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told Reuters Health. "There are things that communities can do to try to reduce child mortality."
Child fatality review teams used death certificates, hospital records, autopsy and police reports to review 4,806 cases of children who died in Arizona from 1995 to 1999.
The review was conducted by the Arizona Child Fatality Review Program (ACFRP), which was established by state law in 1993 and has been responsible for assessing the cause of death of each Arizona child since then. Led by lead author Dr. Mary E. Rimsza, the researchers published an overview of the program's first 5 years of data in the July issue of Pediatrics.
They reported that 29% of all deaths of children in the study were preventable.
And the likelihood of preventability increased with age, with 38% of the deaths among children over 1 month old judged preventable and 56% of the deaths of children over age 9 years judged preventable.
A child's death is judged "preventable" if "an individual or the community could reasonably have done something that would have changed the circumstances that led to the child's death."
Some of the situations judged to have been preventable were the vast majority of drownings, which could have been avoided by better parental supervision or fences; infectious diseases that could have been prevented by vaccines; and cases of sudden infant death syndrome in which unsafe sleeping arrangements led to suffocation.
In general, death by medical illness was judged to be preventable only 8% of the time, compared to death by unintentional injuries, which were judged preventable 91% of the time.
Motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of preventable deaths each year, including cases where the child was not properly restrained, was riding in the back of a pickup truck, or was not wearing a helmet while riding an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) or motorcycle. Instances where the child was killed by a motor vehicle while crossing the street were usually considered preventable by better supervision or use of crosswalks.
Other unintentional injuries that often could have been prevented included burns, choking, poisoning, suffocation and bike injuries.
Although inaction or inappropriate action of child protective services is often blamed when abused children die, the researchers found that in 79% of these cases, the agency had no previous involvement with the child.
Many of the avoidable deaths might have been prevented if neighbors or relatives had reported any earlier abuse to child protective services, Marshall noted.
In addition to preventing child mortality, the group also aims to reduce overall harm to children, he said. "We're not just talking about death, but injury as well," he noted. "For each child who is killed by injury, many more are injured.
"The advice to parents is the necessity of following basic safety recommendations: making sure children get vaccinations; when in a car, are put in a car seat or booster seat," he added. "There's been a tremendous progress in reducing infant and child mortality in past century, yet there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Hopefully, this will help people's awareness that we can do better."
SOURCE: Pediatrics 2002;110:e11.
And, I imagine Arizona is not a strict gun control state, so this is good news for our side...
You beat me to it. Talk about nanny government...
"If only the government would take all children immediately after birth, and place them in well-padded bubbles (with interior colors chosen by a panel of expert child psychologists) for the next 18 years, no child will ever again die!"
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