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Young Black, Native-American Children at Higher Risk of Fatal Accidents
Despite years of largely successful public campaigns to reduce the number of deadly childhood accidents, new research suggests those efforts haven't had the desired effect for black or American Indian/Alaskan Native children.
Statistics from 2003 show that young black children were 63 percent more likely to die from an unintentional injury than white children, and young American Indian and Alaskan Native children were more than two times more likely to die.
"The message is that we've come a long way, but there is a still a lot of room for improvement," said study lead author Joyce C. Pressley, assistant professor of epidemiology, health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Pressley and her colleagues did the study to see how national prevention campaigns - including those pushing bicycle helmets, automobile child safety seats and education programs for parents - are reaching different racial and ethnic groups.
"We can show in individual studies, in small, single communities, that these approaches work," she said of previous research. "The question is whether they're being disseminated widely to all populations. The only way to really figure that out is to look at national data."
The researchers examined national statistics from 1981 to 2003 on fatal injuries among children, from birth to 4 years old, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The rate of unintentional fatal injuries declined among all racial and ethnic groups - blacks, whites, American Indians/Alaskan Natives and Asian/Pacific Islanders - during the time period reviewed. Injury rates among Hispanics went down, too, during much of that period, but they weren't tracked separately until 1990.
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