Injuries are preventable problems that we don’t have to live with, but our ability to prevent them is under attack. We all have seen the data:
· Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 10 to 34. Among the more than 49,000 people in the United States who died by suicide in 2022, people who live in rural areas, veterans, tribal populations, people of color and LGBTQ+ people die of suicide at higher rates than others.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
· Overdose claimed more than 100,000 lives last year and is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44
· Motor vehicle crashes are the second leading cause of death for children aged 1 to 12.
· Firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among children and teens ages 1 to 19
These are the numbers, but we need to see the faces. Most of us have lost people we care about to suicide, drug overdoses, motor vehicle crashes and firearm injuries. These are problems that cross all demographic lines: racial, economic, political and geographic. In fact, for Americans from ages 1 to 44, injuries like these kill more people than any other cause.
People used to think that motor vehicle injuries and drug overdoses were just “accidents.” They thought these injuries just happened, and if they couldn’t be predicted, they couldn’t be prevented. And they thought that intentional injuries or violence were just the result of bad people in this world. They said that bad people had always existed and there was nothing that could be done to prevent bad things from happening as long as there were bad people around.
But in 1985, a landmark report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, “Injury in America: A Continuing Public Health Problem,” said that injuries can be prevented through a scientific evidence-based approach and recommended that a center for injury control be established at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors of this report picked CDC because CDC is the nation’s prevention agency and prevention is the most important way to address these problems. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) was established in 1992 in response to this report. NCIPC supports scientific research to answer four basic questions about each type of injury or violence: What is the problem? What are the causes? What works to prevent it? And how do you scale it up and implement those programs that are effective?
NCIPC has public health researchers; experts in data collection and analysis; physicians, psychologists and behavioral scientists; and people trained in policy and communications. Their collective skills in injury and violence prevention are unequaled anywhere in the world.
CDC does not attempt to solve these problems alone. NCIPC works closely with other federal agencies and departments and provides both financial resources and expertise to state, local, tribal and territorial health departments to develop and implement effective programs. The work of the injury center complements but does not duplicate the work of other agencies. For example, CDC has extensive data collection and analysis capabilities and shares these results with federal agencies that focus more on program delivery. NCIPC also works with the nation’s pediatricians, law enforcement personnel, the religious community, veterans and teachers. In addition, NCIPC works closely with community members to formulate and implement effective strategies.
Injuries destroy individual lives, families and communities. We all live under these threats, no matter where we live and who we are and who we vote for. The work that NCIPC does is evidence-based and nonpartisan. It uses the best science and data available to address problems that affect both red states and blue states.
In economic terms alone, injuries and violence cost us collectively $4.2 trillion. This includes medical care costs ($327 billion), loss of work ($69 billion) and the value of lives and the quality of lives lost ($3.8 trillion). In terms of years of potential life lost, injuries — including suicide, overdoses, motor vehicle crashes and firearm injuries — account for 40% of all of this lost time, more years than taken by heart disease, cancer or the coronavirus.
The dollars we invest in injury prevention are just a tiny fraction of what injuries cost us as a nation. Three-quarters of NCIPC’s $761 million budget goes to partners at state and local levels, supporting health departments in every state collect and use information that helps them save lives from overdoses, suicide and violence. NCIPC experts support communities and health departments with the latest data and best information on how to protect all of us from child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence and other forms of violence. NCIPC also helps communities and families prevent unintentional injuries such as drownings, traumatic brain injuries and falls.
Despite the nation’s great need and potential for preventing injuries, the House of Representatives recently voted to eliminate CDC’s entire budget for preventing injuries. This is irresponsible and discounts the important contributions that CDC has made to injury prevention and will continue to make into the future
This is not the first time that NCIPC has become a target. In 1996, the National Rifle Association mounted an effort to stop the gun violence prevention research that then newly established center was supporting. The effort was led by a Republican congressman from Arkansas, Jay Dickey, whose amendment to House budget appropriations effectively brought the federal funding of this research to a halt. He came to believe that in cutting off funding for this for the area of gun violence prevention, he had made a big mistake and he soon started to work to restore that funding. Dickey soon understood that the problem of gun violence was destroying families and communities and was preventable by interventions that could be discovered through scientific research, interventions that would both reduce gun violence and protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Dickey became a strong advocate for funding NCIPC research — the research he had earlier tried to block.
He realized that injuries were not a partisan problem. Injuries affect us all, and Dickey wanted to see Congress support science that would protect all of us. We should support these efforts, not obstruct them.
We are all in this together. And working together, we can ensure a safer future for all. It is critical and important that the funding for NCIPC be continued.
Mark Rosenberg was assistant U.S. Surgeon General and the founding director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. He is president emeritus of The Task Force for Global Health.
