USA: Gun violence send 8,300 kids to hospitals each year, study finds

https://ift.tt/2zbDcFg https://ift.tt/2Jt8j3G Some 75,000 youths under the age of 18 were sent to US emergency rooms due to gun violence from 2006 to 2014, at a cost of some $2.5 billion, researchers said Monday. Gunshot wounds put an average of 8,300 U.S. kids into the hospital every year, according to a new analysis released Monday. Close to half of them were shot on purpose and another 40 percent were shot accidentally, the researchers reported. Six percent of those who made it to the hospital died, the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reported. They said while mass school shootings get the headlines, there's a day-in, day-out toll that adds up to even more. "While mass shootings garner significant media and social attention, unfortunately they're not a good reflection of the actual burden of firearm-related injuries. In our study, we found that for every 100,000 teenagers and children arriving to the emergency department, 11 come for a gun-related injury," said Dr. Faiz Gani, who worked on the study. Separately, the American College of Physicians released new guidelines calling for gun violence to be treated as a public health emergency, and backing legislation to help control gun deaths. And the group, which represents general practitioners, urged physicians to ask people whether they have guns in their homes. The Johns Hopkins team had set out to quantify how much it costs to treat children and teens who are injured by firearms. They used emergency room data from 2006 to 2014, covering 75,000 youths. The average hospital costs were $2,445 for emergency room visits and $44,000 if the injured child was admitted to the hospital, they found. The annual price tag: $270 million, they reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Pediatrics. Unfortunately, these numbers are likely the tip of the iceberg as we were unable to account for subsequent costs for long-term therapy/rehabilitation or expenses associated with lost work for the parents," Gani said. The daily burden is alarming, American College of Physicians said, and updated its policy recommendations for reducing gun-related deaths. "Firearm violence continues to be a public health crisis in the United States that requires the nation's immediate attention," the group wrote in the new guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

from Liveleak.com Rss Feed - Recent threads https://ift.tt/2Deyue3
via IFTTT