WASHINGTON – Maryland had one of the lowest death rates in the nation from home injuries last year, according to a study released Thursday.
The report by the Home Safety Council said Maryland recorded 4.56 deaths per 100,000 people from falls, poisoning, fire and burns, suffocation, drowning or other deaths in the home. Maryland ranked relatively low in all the categories except for “other,” where it ranked 25th.
Only Utah and Massachusetts, with death rates of 3.95 and 3.56, respectively, were lower than Maryland. New Mexico had the highest home-injury death rate, with 17.31 deaths per 100,000 people.
The report’s authors could not point to any one factor that might have caused one state to be safer than another. But Carol Runyan, an injury prevention researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that certain demographic factors like age and poverty might play a role.
“If a state has a higher percentage of elderly people, that might influence the way the rankings turn out,” she said. “I suspect that might be the case in many of the Southwestern states.”
The inaugural report by the Home Safety Council said that almost 20,000 Americans die each year from unintentional injuries in the house at a cost of almost $380 billion each year in medical bills, lost work hours and other costs.
“So much of the national attention has been turned to the threat of terrorism, we have forgotten about the threat at our own backdoor – home injuries,” said Dr. Sue Binder, an official with the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The council assembled the report by researching the causes of death from hospitals and national databases, but its authors admitted that much of the data in this, their first report, is incomplete.
The report does not include “non-transportation injury deaths for which location was never reported,” for example, the group said in a press release. And while the study does not include death by violence, Runyan noted that it does include heroin and cocaine overdoses under the “poisoning” category.
“No standard method appears to exist for reporting home injuries,” Runyan said.
Despite this, the Home Safety Council believes the numbers alarming enough that it needs to spread the word about preventing home injuries. David Oliver, the group’s president and executive director, said that most home injuries, like falls, cuts and bruises, can be prevented.
“We take our homes for granted,” Oliver said. “We don’t make things safer because for the most part we don’t even know the problem exists.”