American journal of preventive medicine
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Unintentional injuries are a leading cause of death in the United States. It is unclear, however, what proportion of these injuries occur in the home. The purpose of this paper is to quantify and describe fatal unintentional injuries that take place in the home environment. ⋯ Unintentional injury in the home is a significant problem. Specific home injury issues include falls among older adults, poisonings among middle-aged adults, fire/burn injuries among older adults and children, and inhalation/suffocation and drowning among young children. In addition, recommendations are presented for improvements to the NVSS.
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Unintentional home injuries impose significant, but little reported, costs to society. The most tangible are medical and indirect costs. A less-tangible cost is the value of lost quality of life due to impairment or death. ⋯ These estimates indicate that unintentional home injuries, especially falls, are a major problem in the United States. Falls are a particular problem in need of more attention.
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To evaluate the hypothesis that physical activity independently predicts type 2 diabetes risk in postmenopausal African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Caucasian women. ⋯ These findings suggest a stronger and more independent association of physical inactivity with development of diabetes in Caucasian women than in minority women, but could also be explained by less precise risk estimates in minority women or the role of chance.
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This paper investigates the association between implementing a personal space smoking restriction for the home or automobile, and various sociodemographic, social, behavioral, and attitudinal variables. ⋯ Results suggest that a substantial segment of African Americans have accepted and translated public policy concerns about ETS into practice and reveal other variables that could be targeted in future interventions to increase implementation of personal space smoking restrictions.
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While the overall death rate from unintentional carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning has decreased in the United States due to improved automobile emissions controls and a decline in CO poisonings from motor vehicles, exposures have not changed from some sources of CO. One of these is the operation of portable electrical generators in poorly ventilated spaces. This study sought to describe the population poisoned from CO produced by portable electric generators, and to determine the reasons that generators are operated in a hazardous fashion. ⋯ CO poisoning from portable electric generators occurs in a characteristic population, in a few typical locations and for a limited number of reasons. This information may help target prevention efforts for this form of poisoning, such as warning labels or educational programs.