Each year, Utah sees its percentage of accidental injuries caused by firearms. When state health officials looked closely at the many injuries that required emergency care in hospitals, they discovered that most were due to deficiencies in the most important elements of gun safety.
Nearly three-quarters of all unintentional injuries in the state involve men between the ages of 15 and 44, most of whom are shot while handling or cleaning weapons. With investment from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Utah optimized its collection of firearm injury knowledge and used that data to create a public service crusade to prevent accidental firearm injuries.
But getting to that point required a commitment to a 1996 federal rule prohibiting the CDC from using the federal budget to protect or publicize gun control.
The amendment made access to granular data, such as who was injured by firearms and the cases that caused those injuries, difficult for fitness officials, lawmakers and politicians to find. It took them a year or more to get such statistics as they went along. outside of hospitals and through the public fitness bureaucracy. This has thwarted efforts to fight the tens of thousands of gun deaths that occur in the United States each year.
However, as of 2020, nine states and the District of Columbia have won money from the CDC to install pilot systems to boost the publication of this information, in order to better address the public health problem.
Near real-time knowledge gathered by the Fire Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program led Utah to launch its public service crusade 3 years ago. helped with the messages,” says Joel Johnson, communications coordinator for the state violence and injury prevention program and the state and fitness department. Human Services.
It’s tricky to identify a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the crusading and fewer unintentional firearm injuries, especially since those injuries peaked in 2020, most likely because of the pandemic, says Jerry Nelson, the state’s epidemiologist on firearm injury rate. But, he says, the trend is returning to pre-COVID levels.
Video about gun protection in Utah.
Marissa Zwald of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control said when she helped launch FASTER 3 years ago, “Array’s primary goal . . . solve the challenge of timeliness of our knowledge about firearm injuries nationwide. “
“Our classic surveillance systems for tracking firearm injuries are behind schedule for about two years,” she says.
FASTER grants of about $225,000 to states involved in the pilot program allowed them to deploy equipment to extract codes that doctors use in electronic hospital records to record patient diagnoses. The amendment had largely stifled government studies to examine violence and gun prevention. However, in 2018, Congress agreed to free up to $25 million for studies and the cash included in a 2020 spending bill.
Amanda Dylina Morse, who helped establish Washington state’s FASTER program, said that in the past “CDC paid many fitness departments at the state and county level to participate in many opioid-related surveillance and reaction work” and that FASTER reflects some of those strategies and procedures. With opioids, Washington has worked with local fitness officials for percentage knowledge, which, in turn, has helped improve the effectiveness of prevention, intervention and remedy programs. The hope is that faster availability of firearms knowledge of injuries will result in similar successes.
Morse, who is now a clinical instructor in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health, says the main difference was the investment that had been cut under the Dickey Amendment. Because of Congress’ commitment to prohibition, “this was the first time the federal government was able to spend CDC money on gun paints in a long time. “
Kenan Zamore, an epidemiologist at the Department of Health in Washington, D. C. , says that traditionally, the most knowledge about gun injuries comes from law enforcement, but that doesn’t provide a complete picture. ” he says.
Washington, D. C. , used part of its CDC investment through FASTER to create a public dashboard that went live in recent weeks. It extracts diagnostic knowledge, as well as the age and ethnicity of victims, by adding the neighborhood and zip code where they live. Among other things, the dashboard lately shows an alarming 18% year-over-year increase in gun-like visits to hospital emergency departments. A heat map on it also indicates that around 11 p. m. lesions
In addition, Zamore says, D. C. found that up to 40 percent of other people in the district who show up at hospitals with nonfatal gunshot wounds are later killed with a gun. probably to save lives.
One way this data is used is to prepare hospital violence cessation systems designed to reduce confrontations and mediate confrontations between potential abusers and victims. Where such systems have been introduced, they have proven to be very effective.
With real-time data, fitness officials can help make sure those systems are properly staffed, Zamore says. “It helped us deploy resources efficiently, but it also [gave] more information. “
The same is true in New Mexico, which also won FASTER funding. Rachel Wexler, chief of the injury and violence prevention segment at the New Mexico Department of Health, says the city of Albuquerque, for example, has “a physically powerful violence intervention network. “program underway. “
With the early availability of data on firearm injuries, “they would have more ability to know where they are physically directing their efforts in Albuquerque,” he says.
It all comes down to taking care of the pump, Morse says. It is a concept of public fitness that has its origins in the cholera epidemic of 1854 in London. that contaminated water was to blame. ” For guns, you may not be able to find control of your bomb if you don’t perceive all those non-fatal incidents,” she says.
You can’t kill other people through gun violence, “but you can surely kill other living people,” Morse says.
An earlier edition of this story did not give the full name Amanda Dylina Morse. He also falsely stated that she was affiliated with the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is most recently in the UW School of Public Health.