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We’re Ignoring the Most Pressing Childhood Health Crisis
One thing kills more U.S. kids than anything else, and nothing is being done about it
Guns now kill more American children than car crashes, cancer, drugs or any other single cause, based on multiple analyses of data that do not include recent school shootings. The burgeoning childhood health crisis, unique to this country, has pediatricians facing a challenge they never expected when they signed up to care for kids, and frustrated that virtually nothing is being done to curb it.
That’s not some liberal viewpoint. It’s what pediatricians and other physicians are saying.
“When I became a pediatrician, I never thought that I would care for so many children who had been shot,” said Annie Andrews, MD, a pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina. “But as a hospital-based doctor for the past 12 years I’ve seen it happen again and again.”
The statistics are staggeringly sad
Gun-related deaths among those 18 and younger outpaced car-crash deaths for that age group starting in 2019, Andrews and her colleagues report in a new study in the journal Pediatrics.
A separate recent study found youth gun deaths soared 83 percent in the past decade. The picture is bleakest for Black youth, who experienced a 40% rise in gun deaths just from 2019 to 2020, researchers conclude in the journal Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. “We must reverse this deeply troubling and unacceptable trend in youth firearm fatalities, especially among youth of color,” said the study’s co-author, Karen Sheehan, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
“The increasing firearm-related mortality reflects a longer-term trend and shows that we continue to fail to protect our youth from a preventable cause of death,” a separate group of two medical doctors and a statistician from the University of Michigan wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.
There’s some serious irony in this crisis.
As youth firearm deaths rose over the years, mortality among children due to motor vehicle…
