injury
revere | December 10, 2009We're saving lives on the battlefield. Lives that would have been lost in previous wars. That's good. War takes too many lives. But there are ways to take lives that don't involve killing someone. And we're taking a lot of lives that way, many more than before. Here's Liam Clancy with the great song by Australian singer-song writer Eric Bogle:
revere | November 20, 2009Swine flu is a special danger to the young, but the biggest danger to the young is not an infectious disease but unintentional accidents. No matter what your age accident is among the top ten causes of death, but for those between the ages of 1 and 44 it is number one. Prevention oriented accident specialists are fond of saying that "accidents are no accidents," by which they mean that many accidental deaths are in some sense avoidable, not freakish twists of fortune. So wear your seat belts and don't go golfing in lightning storms. And while you're at it, have health insurance, since there…
revere | June 16, 2009No swine flu again today. At least no swine flu on this blog. There's a shit house full of swine flu in the world. But we are otherwise occupied and there is a bevy of terrific flu bloggers out there. And I was away from the keyboard all day yesterday, which causes serious withdrawal symptoms: anxiety and palpitations when I think of the email piling up and the posts not written. It could be worse. I could be around my computer and seriously injured:
According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, more than 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries…
revere | May 27, 2009We don't usually think of power outages as an important cause of poisoning but it is. Electrical power has become such a necessary part of basic needs -- think of light at night and refrigeration -- that if it is interrupted for more than a few hours people will turn to gasoline powered generators to provide it. Apparently, though, the fridge and the light bulb are not the only necessities. Experience with recent disasters is revealing that people have new kinds of imperatives:
Hours after Hurricane Ike roared ashore in Texas, more than two million homes were without power, which left some…
revere | April 11, 2009The Weekly Toll is at once inspiring and heartwrenching, a record of unending and unnecessary death in America's workplaces. We've posted about it a couple of times in years past (here, here; read some of the entries), but not for a while. The Weekly Toll appeared for some years on Jordan Barab's superb health and safety blog, Confined Space, and yesterday we brought you the wonderful news that Jordan has been selected as Deputy Assistant Secretary at OSHA (and in fact will be Acting OSHA Director starting next week). That's the good news. The bad news is that Death didn't decide to give it…
revere | April 1, 2009We have a small dog in our house. She came to us from Mrs. R.'s elderly mother, who had decided that a dog would be a good companion. She lived alone in the city. She also had low vision, and within weeks she had already fallen over the frisky little pup who was constantly under foot. As a public health measure, we took the pooch, although we already had a dog of our own. That was seven years ago and Rosie remains a beloved member of the family. She discovered we were easily trainable, so that part went fine (for her). Now CDC has published a report verifying that the circumstances that…
revere | February 22, 2009I've seen surgeons blow up in the operating room but never saw an operating room blow up. But according to the Wall Street Journal, it's not that rare for them to catch fire and sometimes worse. Operating rooms are full of flammable gases and materials and oxygen. Moreover it isn't just a matter of taking a fire extinguisher off the wall or dumping a pail of water on the patient. There is the little matter of sterile procedures. So I was quite taken aback by a figure given in the article of 650 surgical suite fires each year in the US and maybe four times that number of "almost" fires (e.g.,…
revere | January 16, 2009I'm on the road today. I'm a member of an external advisory committee for a research program at a university about an hour by car from my own. Not bad duty. You get to listen to scientists talking about science all day (some of us actually like that) and you get asked your opinions (whether well founded or not). But it's winter, there's a storm brewing and the rush hour traffic on the interstate at 7 in the morning is very heavy, cruising along at 60 miles an hour. I'm driving my 14 year old shitbox Volvo sedan with the hood that looks like it will pop up as I drive (it won't; in fact I'm…
revere | November 8, 2008When I think of what happens in November I think of elections, Thanksgiving, the first snowfall, the advent of winter. I don't think about being killed by running into a deer. But November is apparently the most likely time for that to happen. And it happens to a couple of hundred people a year in the US:
In November, when it comes to avoiding deer collisions, it's not the one you see crossing the road that's likely to get you, according to a wildlife expert.
"It's the one that's chasing her," said Dr. Billy Higginbotham, Texas AgriLife Extension Service fisheries and wildlife specialist.…
revere | September 3, 2008I've mentioned my shit box of a car pretty often here, usually in connection with trying to get someone to buy it. I had another flat this morning from a rim that is so rusty it doesn't hold a seal anymore. I thought I'd replaced it at the junkyard last week but it seems they replaced the wrong rim. That's what happens when you buy tires and rims at the junkyard. I'm not really in to cars, which is why I can keep driving my 14 year old monstrosity. It gets me from A to B, which is what I want. It doesn't have much hi tech stuff, although I like that kind of thing. My next car maybe.
It does…
revere | August 9, 2008Recently a relative was sent home from the hospital with her own oxygen supply. It wasn't a cylinder of compressed oxygen but an oxygen concentrator, a device that takes room air and removes a lot of the nitrogen by passing the air through a zeolite canister. These devices can supply 50 - 95% oxygen. About 1 million people over the age of 65 are on home based Long Term Oxygen Therapy (LTOH) supported by Medicare. Many of them need oxygen because they have chronic lung disease brought on by their addiction to cigarettes (not the case for my relative, however). Cigarettes. Oxygen. Not a good…
revere | June 29, 2008We take for it granted that technology can be used to tag objects in various ways, useful and otherwise. The anti-theft devices used on retail clothing stores are a familiar example. Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) are used for this purpose as well as for security access. I have a device like that on my windshield for automatic highway tolls on the turnpike. Hospitals also have a strong interest in keeping track of lots of items like pharmaceuticals, equipment or even ordinary sponges used in surgery. Counting and keeping track of sponges is routine so none are inadvertently…
grrlscientist | May 17, 2008tags: Big Brown, horseracing, Preakness Stakes, Triple Crown
Kent Desmoreaux rides Big Brown across the finish line at the 2008 Preakness Stakes today. The horse's ears are pricked forward, indicating that he is running easily.
Image: Jonathan Ernst (Reuters).
Odds-on favorite and Kentucky Derby winner, Big Brown, won the Preakness Stakes today by 5 1/4 lengths. This victory makes him 2/3rds of the way to winning horse racing's Triple Crown. But Big Brown's win isn't really news, if you ask me, since he is the only talented living 3-year-old racehorse in America this year, so of course he…
revere | April 14, 2008Boingboing had a short notice about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System ("FARS"), plugging it as an all purpose dicing and slicing source for information on motor vehicle related deaths in the US. You can make your own custom queries to find out about auto fatalities in your own county. FARS is a great resource. But there is another one, hosted at CDC, that is even better: WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System, "whiskers").
WISQARS reports injury statistics for each state over time. You can also compare your…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
revere | August 17, 2007[This is from two years ago. Since I just got through driving 1000 miles to reach a beach with no internet access -- imagine that -- I thought it was appropriate. Or not. Just don't read it while you are driving. Please.]
In the 1930s my uncle got a car that had a radio in it. The family was aghast at the foolhardiness of this recipe for disaster. Now the same arguments are being played out with mobile phones. But is it the same? I think not.
Research to be published soon in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows what a number of other studies have shown: talking on a car phone while driving is…
revere | June 10, 2007Maybe you didn't hear about the poison gas attacks on American communities this year. No? Well in January two towns in Kentucky were attacked, a day apart. OK, there weren't exactly not exactly attacked. That part isn't true. But assume for a moment that each of the following two incidents was the result of terrorists:
Irvine, Kentucky, January 15, 2007: Four railway training cars were sent careening twenty miles down a track before colliding with unoccupied engines in a town of 3000 people. On impact, a flammable solvent, butyl acetate, ignited and then exploded. People living in twenty…
revere | April 13, 2007In another post we pointed out that the number one cause of death in people aged 1 to 44 is unintentional injury. But some injuries are intentional, about half directed to other people and half self directed. Among people aged 15 to 44 intentional injury represents the second leading cause of death, about half homicides and half suicides (CDC). Guns figure prominently in both.
A recent study by Harvard School of Public Health researchers published in the Journal of Trauma shows that in states with higher rates of guns in households there is a significantly higher rate of suicide:
In the 15…
revere | April 8, 2007To date, more than 90% of the bird flu victims have been under the age of 44. But what's the leading cause of death in people between the ages of 1 and 44 in the US? And the fifth leading cause of death (after heart disease, stroke, cancer and chronic respiratory disease) for overall? And largely preventable? Answer below the fold.
Injury. And working teenagers are among the victims:
Despite federal regulations intended to protect them, many teenagers in the U.S. use dangerous equipment or work long hours during the school week, according to a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study…
revere | February 13, 2007The sad saga of Anna Nicolle Smith has pushed the equally sad story of Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak off the front pages and it's not our intention to revive it. But we would like to call attention to one aspect that has received no discussion:
Police said Nowak drove 900 miles, donned a disguise and was armed with a BB gun and pepper spray when she confronted a woman she believed was a competitor for the affections of Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein, an unmarried fellow astronaut.
[snip]
Police said Nowak told them that she only wanted to scare Shipman into talking to her about her relationship and…