Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Every day 33 children suffer agricultural-related injuries, one child dies every three days

About 33 children are injured every day in agricultural-related accidents and one child dies every three days, according to the 2017 fact sheet on childhood agricultural accidents by the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety in Marshfield, Wis. One-fourth of all fatalities involved machinery, 17 percent motor vehicles, including ATVs, and 16 percent were drownings. Among working youth, tractors and ATVs were the leading cause of death.
In 2014, an estimated 7,469 household youth were injured on a farm. Of those, 60 percent were not working at the time of the injury. Also, an estimated 738 hired youth and about 3,735 visiting youth were injured on farms in 2014. The leading cause of injury for household working youth was vehicles, while animals were the leading source of injury for household non-working youth and visitors.
The National Children's Center found that the overall number of farm injuries are declining, injuries to household youth have remained steady, but injury rates increased among household youth on farms in 2014 for ages 10-19. Research found that "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."

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