Weekly Article: Holiday Injuries

Originally sent by Joelle


Hope you are enjoying your Memorial Day!! I figured the attached article would be appropriate for our weekly EMTC article review. The objective of this study was to calculate injury rates of holiday-related injuries among children <19yo that presented to US ED’s between 1997-2006.Data were obtained from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), which collects information on individuals who are treated for injuries in a nationally representative stratified probability sample of 98 US hospital EDs, including 8 children's hospitals The conclusions were that most injuries sustained on holidays were not holiday-specific necessarily – yet still some interesting trends emerged that may help us in injury prevention education for our families. Here is a summary of the data analysis … (I highlighted Memorial day related data) On Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, children who were < 5 years sustained the greatest proportion of injuriesOn New Year's, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween, children who were aged 10 to 14 years sustained the greatest proportion of injuriesOn New Year's, 15- to 19-year-olds had a significantly greater proportion of injuries compared with all other holidays (P < .001 for each holiday) ( I personally recall this phenomenon  as I worked this past New Year’s J)



The face accounted for the greatest proportion of injuries on Easter (16.0%), Memorial Day (15.6%), Fourth of July (15.9%), Thanksgiving (17.7%), and Christmas (17.8%).

Finger/hand injuries accounted for the greatest proportion of injuries on New Year's (16.1%), Labor Day (14.8%), and Halloween (17.6%).Of the finger/hand injuries sustained on Halloween, 33.3% were lacerations and 20.1% were fractures.On Christmas, eye injuries accounted for 1.7% of the total injuries. Among the 5 most common injury diagnoses, lacerations accounted for the greatest proportion of injuries for each holiday, ranging from 26.3% of all injuries on Labor Day and Halloween to 34.4% of injuries on Christmas. The author’s conclude that future injury prevention efforts should target Labor Day and Memorial Day. They have the highest rates of injury of all holidays (see graph below). The most common etiology for injuries for Labor Day and Memorial Day were bicycles and football.