Murder, suicide, car crashes, and addiction have all contributed to a spike in deaths among US children and teens in recent years, a government study suggests. The death rate for youth aged 10 to 19 rose 12 percent between 2013 and 2016, eroding a previous decline stretching back to 1999, according to the study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Injuries accounted for 70 percent of deaths in this age group in 2016, far outpacing fatalities from natural causes like cancer and heart disease. "The most surprising result is that the rise cannot be pinpointed to one cause," said lead study author Sally Curtin of the CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics.
"Increases were observed for all types of injury - unintentional, suicide and homicide," Curtin said by email. In the last year of the study, roughly 33 children and teens out of every 100,000 died from injuries, up from about 30 deaths for every 100,000 youth in 2013. For 1999, the first year of the study, roughly 44 of every 100,000 kids and adolescents died from injuries. Unintentional injuries and accidents, the leading cause of injury deaths for youth aged 10 to 19 in 2016, increased 13 percent between 2013 and 2016 after declining 49 percent between 1999 and 2013.
Most of these accidents were traffic fatalities, accounting for 62 percent of cases, followed by poisoning and drowning. Homicide rates climbed 27 percent from 2014 to 2016, after dropping 35 percent between 2007 and 2014. Guns accounted for 87 percent of these murders, and many of the remaining cases involved knives.