Preventable injuries kill 2000 children every day
Source: World Health Organization

More than 2000 children die every day as a result of unintentional or accidental injuries. Every year tens of millions more worldwide are taken to hospitals with injuries that often leave them with lifelong disabilities, according to a new report by WHO and UNICEF.

The World report on child injury prevention provides the first comprehensive global assessment of unintentional childhood injuries and prescribes measures to prevent them. It concludes that if proven prevention measures were adopted everywhere at least 1000 children’s lives could be saved every day.
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The report finds that the top five causes of injury deaths are:

1. Road crashes: They kill 260 000 children a year and injure about 10 million. They are the leading cause of death among 10-19 year olds and a leading cause of child disability.
2. Drowning: It kills more than 175 000 children a year. Every year, up to 3 million children survive a drowning incident. Due to brain damage in some survivors, non-fatal drowning has the highest average lifetime health and economic impact of any injury type.
3. Burns: Fire-related burns kill nearly 96 000 children a year and the death rate is 11 times higher in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries.
4. Falls: Nearly 47 000 children fall to their deaths every year, but hundreds of thousands more sustain less serious injuries from a fall.
5. Poisoning: More than 45 000 children die each year from unintended poisoning.

+ Full Report (PDF; 3.9 MB)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Children and families, International, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.