Injuries due to firearms in three cities

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Injuries due to firearms in three cities

Category: Injury|Journal: The New England Journal of Medicine (full text)|Author: A Kellermann, B Hackman, F Rivara, G Somes, J Banton, M Cummings, R Lee|Year: 1996

Injuries due to firearms are a major health problem in the United States. Although several studies have documented the impact of firearm-related deaths, little is known about the epidemiologic characteristics of nonfatal gunshot wounds. Hospital records have been used to study patients who have been admitted, but they do not contain information about patients who do not survive to admission or who are treated and released. Emergency departments treat hospitalized and nonhospitalized patients, but they have no data on victims who die at the scene of an injury. Medical examiners’ reports can be used to document deaths, but nonfatal injuries are necessarily excluded. Health care records often lack important details about the events surrounding an injury, which can only be obtained from police records. In order to describe more clearly the epidemiologic characteristics of injuries caused by firearms, we used all these sources of data to study such injuries in three cities: Memphis, Tennessee; Seattle; and Galveston, Texas.

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