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  • The Incidence and Economic Burden of Injuries in the United States
  • Tim Heise (bio)
The Incidence and Economic Burden of Injuries in the United States. Eric Finkelstein, Phaedra S. Corso, Ted R. Miller. Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. Hardback 208 pp. $49.99.

Motor vehicle accidents, falls, and all other injuries remain the fourth leading cause of death over all ages and the number one cause of death and disability for children and young adults in the U.S. The U.S. health care system was billed for $80.2 billion in lifetime medical costs, and the U.S. macro economy was encumbered with an estimated $326 billion in productivity losses for injuries that occurred in 2000.

In 1989, Dorothy Rice, Ellen Mackenzie, et al. reported to the U.S. Congress (in what was later published as Cost of Injury in the United States1) providing definitive lifetime cost estimates for injuries that occurred in 1985. With major improvements in reporting and surveillance in the last two decades and no major studies completed, Eric Finkelstein, Phaedra Corso, Ted Miller, and associates updated the landmark 1989 report with their work, The Incidence and Economic Burden of Injuries in the United States. Some of the prevention, reporting, and surveillance improvements that have occurred since 1985 are an increase in injury reporting requirements, new safety technologies, new policies and laws, and new national injury surveys. All of these improvements are likely to influence the occurrence of injury, its economic costs, and/ or our ability to quantify them.

Using the same definitions of injury and injury mechanisms as in the 1985 study, Chapter 1 quantifies the incidence of injuries by age, sex, mechanism, body region, nature of injury, and severity in 2000. In Chapter 2 Finkelstein and colleagues analyze the incidence counts in terms of the "unit cost of medical treatment and rehabilitation" to approximate the lifetime costs of injuries that occurred in 2000. Chapter 3 estimates the productivity losses borne by society as a result of the injuries. Chapter 4 measures the sum of the lifetime medical cost and the total lost productivity. The concluding Chapter 5 analyzes the trends and implications of injuries sustained in 2000.

Among other things, we learn that since 1989 the rate of medically-treated injuries has decreased by 15% from 21,330 per 100,000 to 18,135 per 100,000. Two major sub-populations that saw an increase in injuries since 1989 were females over the age of 75 and motor-vehicle crash injuries to males age 5 to 14. The data demonstrate that injury prevention efforts must continue for all and must increase for the young and elderly.

The information that this study provides is helpful in our health prevention efforts in that it improves on an existing calculatory model in which we will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of our health promotion and prevention efforts. We now can make [End Page 401] more effective allocations of scarce resources for those who would gain the most: the poor and underserved.

Tim Heise

Tim Heise can be reached at the University of Texas at El Paso, 7360 Golden Hawk, El Paso, TX 79912; (915) 867-4094; tjheise@miners.utep.edu.

Note

1. Rice DP, MacKenzie EJ, Jones AS, et al. Cost of injury in the United States: a report to Congress. San Francisco, CA: Institute for Health and Aging, University of California; Injury Prevention Center, Johns Hopkins University, 1989.

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