Shootings, drug poisonings rise dramatically among children
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Key takeaways:
- From 2011 to 2021, pediatric firearm deaths increased by 87.1% and pediatric poisoning fatalities by 113.1%.
- Pediatric motor vehicle occupant injuries decreased by 47.3% in the same period.
Firearm fatalities and drug poisonings increased dramatically among children in the United States from 2011 to 2021, according to findings from a study led by a mother and her teenage daughter.
“This article was prompted by many dinner table discussions between me and my daughter,” Rebekah Mannix, MD, MPH associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital with a research focus on traumatic brain injury, told Healio.
“We frequently talk about firearm injuries and wanted to understand both fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries in the context of all pediatric injuries,” Mannix said. “Skeptical about my growing alarm over pediatric injury fatalities, my daughter wanted to see the data for herself. After we looked at that data, we decided we should analyze the trends over the past 10 years.”
Mannix and her 16-year-old daughter, Cordelia Mannix — the lead author of the new study — brought Mark Neuman, MD, MPH, into the project because of his expertise in study design and methodology, “and to serve as an impartial referee for our mother-daughter disagreements,” Rebekah Mannix said.
They used the CDC’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) to analyze trends in pediatric injuries stratified by mechanism and intent.
Ultimately, they found that from 2011 to 2021, firearm fatalities among children increased by 87.1%, motor vehicle occupant injuries decreased by 47.3% and drug poisoning fatalities increased by 133.3%. Additionally, nonfatal firearm injuries increased by 113.1% and poison-related injuries increased by 9.9%.
In general, although the data showed that rates of child fatal injuries increased and rates of nonfatal injuries decreased, there were rare exceptions, like self-harm injuries, which increased by 57.1%.
“We were both surprised by the disconnect between decreasing nonfatal injuries and increasing fatal injuries,” Rebekah Mannix said. “We expected those trends to be more concordant.”
The researchers speculated that the drop in nonfatal injuries may be due to recent public health interventions, such as improved car booster seats paired with laws requiring their use and education campaigns to explain how booster seats improve car safety.
“The take-away message is this: There is work to be done,” Rebekah Mannix said. “We, as a discipline, have bent the arc in terms of reducing injuries overall but lethal injuries are on the rise because kids have more access to lethal means, such as firearms or drugs.”
Most important in this, she said, will be encouraging medical professionals to join with politicians and industry stakeholders to make advances “from the production lines to pediatricians’ offices.”
“In the past 5 decades, stakeholders from industry, politics and medicine joined forces to make advances in motor vehicle safety, child-safe packaging, etc., which were enacted at every level from production lines to pediatricians’ offices,” she said. “Those multidisciplinary teams made all the difference in reducing injuries and deaths in children. We need that same sort of stakeholder engagement to address the current epidemic of injury deaths in children and adolescents.”
According to the researchers, the data show trends in firearm and poison-related injury and death that indicate a need for public health efforts and stronger laws to address these rising threats to child health.
“We need many different types of research in this field, including intervention trials,” Rebekah Mannix said. “Observational data suggest that legislation improves pediatric injury outcomes. We need our legislators to actively engage in common sense solutions. Who doesn’t want to protect children from harm? We also need to fund real-world patient-level interventions. Perhaps most importantly, we need to address socioeconomic disparities and structural racism, which are the fuel for this fire.”
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