Litedaughter --
There are two good sources of data for safety statistics, the National
Safety Council and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
The National Safety Council concerns itself with injuries and deaths
due to accidents -- and of course with the prevention of accidents.
They use NCHS statistics -- which include deaths from illness.
The National Safety Council has summary numbers for 2000 here in an
easily readable format. Of 151,268 injury deaths, 3,377 were from
fire:
National Safety Council
"Death Due to Injury, United States 2000" (July 28, 2003)
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm
The Centers for Disease Control published the 2001 information only
about 45 days ago, showing 3,673 deaths from fire (of 157,078 injury
deaths).
CDC
National Center for Health Statistics
"Mortality Data" (September 18, 2003) -- see p. 71, Table 18
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr52/nvsr52_03.pdf
For comparison or analysis purposes, be aware that the "injury deaths"
include suicides, which account for about 33% of the totals each year.
Data for earlier years is here:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/mortdata.htm
My almanac has tables summarized since 1970 and for ACCIDENTS
(excluding suicides), here are some comparable numbers. They show
accidental death rates declining -- at least until recently -- and the
number of fire-related deaths declining dramatically:
1970 TOTAL: 114,638
FIRE: 6,718
1980 TOTAL: 105,718
FIRE: 5,822
1990 TOTAL: 91,983
FIRE: 4,175
2000 TOTAL: 97,900
FIRE: 3,377
Google search strategy:
"National Safety Council"
"Vital Statistics of the United States"
Best regards,
Omnivorous-GA |
