Friday, July 01, 2016

Farm-related accidents claim a child's life every 3 days, and there are 33 injuries a day

Every three days a child dies in an agriculture-related accident, says the 2016 Childhood Agricultural Injuries Fact Sheet produced by the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety.

One-quarter of the deaths involved machinery, and 17 percent motor vehicles; 16 percent were drownings. Tractors were the leading source of deaths, followed by ATVs. Non-fatal injuries occurred at a rate of 33 per day, with vehicles being the leading source of injury for household youth and animals the leading source of injury for household non-working youth and visitors. Sixty percent of injuries occurred to young people who were not working at the time of the injury. About 893,000 youth lived on farms in 2014, and 51 percent worked on the farm.
"While overall numbers of farm injuries are declining, injuries to household youth have held steady," says the report. "Among household youth on farms, injury rates increased in 2014 for youth 10-19 years. From 2003 to 2010, among workers younger than 16 years, the number of worker fatalities in agriculture was consistently higher than in all non-agricultural industries combined." The cost of youth agricultural injuries are an estimated $1 billion per year and fatalities an estimated $420 million per year.

No comments: