Staying Safe Around Dangerous Substances

With all the recent posts about medical controversies I've ended up doing a bit of extra research. After all it helps to know how many people are affected by various syndromes or diseases. Along the way I found a summary of the leading causes of deaths in the United States. Reading down the page I came to the section on leading causes of accidental deaths.

Number 1? Motor Vehicles. They're not just out to kill you in the movies. After that comes unspecified non-transport accidents. Then falls. Then poisoning and noxious substances.

13% of accidental deaths are caused by poisoning. That seems about right to me when it comes to covering all ages.

What surprised me is the stats for poisoning when they're broken down into age groups. The percentage of accidental deaths caused by poisoning for different ages looks like this:

• < 1 yr - 1.6%
• 1-4 yrs - 1.8%
• 5-14 yrs - 1.5%
• 15-24 yrs - 8.2%
• 25-34 yrs - 30.3%
• 45-54 yrs - 24.9%
• 55-64 yrs - 9.2%
• 65-74 yrs - 3.6%
• 75-84 yrs - 2.1%
• > 85 yrs - 1.6%

Those numbers had me thinking. They just didn't make much sense at first. Aren't we supposed to be worried about accidental poisoning in children? Isn't the push to keep chemicals, cleaners, and other noxious substances away from little kids and their inquisitive nature?

The low percentage or under 1 year old makes sense. Not too many infants can poison themselves and parents are very careful around infants. Almost 65% of accidental infant deaths are due to unspecified non-transport accidents. That sounds about right.

Moving up the list though I'd thought that the percentages of accidental deaths would be higher in kids and even in teens. Yes I know there are other accidental causes of death that come in to play as we get older but I never suspected that poisoning was responsible for over a quarter of the accidental deaths for Americans between 25 and 54. What are we doing to ourselves?

What the numbers do show is that poisoning is a significant cause of accidental deaths. National Poison Prevention Week (video) is in March. There are ample tips to be found on protecting your children from dangerous substances. And if you look around you can also find information on preventing poisonings among the elderly (pdf).

All of which is good information and incredibly useful and has saved lives. Even so... maybe all of us in the middle of our lives should be careful as well. Maybe we don't take the chance we'll accidentally poison ourselves seriously enough.

Medical Controversy: The End of Life

North American's don't seem to handle death very well. Other cultures seem to have much more robust and sane traditions on how to handle death in the family. We seem to want to get grieving over with and as a society we don't allow much time for grief or time to cope. This cultural aversion to dealing with death isn't limited to the time after loved ones have died.

The fastest growing segment of our population is the elderly. Those people who've lived a long life and one healthy enough to make them prone to the diseases and problems of the old. We face having a significant portion of our population being elderly with all the trials and tribulations that entails. We're living long enough to fall prey to dementia and to live to the point where we need help every day to just live.

Which makes dealing with the taboos around death important. Choosing how we wish to live out our later years. Or even if we wish to live them out at all under certain conditions. As more people move into the final years of their lives they will start to contemplate how they wish to handle aging and death. Spouses, children, and grandchildren will watch people making difficult and very personal decisions about life and death.

A particularly poignant example that happens to touch on many of the issues we might face is What Broke My Father's Heart by Katy Butler which also carries the telling subtitle "A Pacemaker Wrecks a Family's Life".

Our culture is not yet at the point where we feel comfortable dealing with these issues. We're not used to discussions over do not resuscitate orders or what type of life is or isn't worth living. It will be awkward. It will be challenging. If we do it right maybe we won't look forward to our later years with dread and fear. Maybe they can be our golden years.