Some 20,360 children and teenagers died in the U.S. in 2016 and 60% of those fatalities were preventable injuries, according new study published in the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine. The No. 1 cause: Motor vehicle accidents, which claimed the lives of more than 4,000 teenagers and children. Safety experts say that prevention efforts, awareness campaigns, more sophisticated cars designed to help prevent fatalities and better trauma care have cut the death rate of young people from such crashes in half in less than two decades.
Firearm deaths was the No. 2 cause of death among youth, claiming the lives of more than 3,140 children and teens in 2016, according to the research compiled by a team from a University of Michigan. That equates to approximately eight children dying per day due to preventable deaths related to firearms. The rate of firearm-related death for those aged 1 to 19 years has stayed around the same for nearly the past two decades, the analysis said, although that rate is still more than 36 times as high as the average rate across 12 other high-income countries.
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Cancer was the No. 3 cause of death and accounted for 1,853 deaths of those age 1 to 19, although its death rate has dropped over the last 17 years, and suffocation — mainly suicides by hanging and other means — was No. 4. Suicide, however, is on the rise[2]. Those causes were followed by drowning, drug overdoses/poisonings and birth defects, each with just under 1,000 deaths in each of those categories. (The study used publicly available data from
