A League Table of Child Deaths by Injury in Rich Nations

In every single industrialized country, injury has now become the leading killer of children between the ages of 1 and 14. Taken together, traffic accidents, intentional injuries, drownings, falls, fires, poisonings and other accidents kill more than 20,000 children every year throughout the OECD. Despite these statistics, and the rising worries of parents everywhere, the likelihood of a child dying from intentional or unintentional injury is small and becoming smaller. For a child born into the developed world today, the chances of death by injury before the age of 15 are approximately 1 in 750 - less than half the level of 30 years ago. The likelihood of death from abuse or intentional harm is smaller still - less than 1 in 5,000. On the roads of the industrialized world, child deaths have been declining steadily for more than two decades.