CDC launches program to track violent deaths

A public health approach is being applied to the nation's high homicide and suicide rates.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Sept. 15, 2003.

Washington -- Violence is a major public health threat, and in an attempt to reduce its high death toll, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is readying a crucial tool -- good national data.

The 46,000 homicides and suicides in the United States each year far exceed the fewer than 2,000 deaths caused annually by the flu and vastly overwhelm the 19 deaths caused so far in 2003 by the attention-grabbing West Nile virus.

Even so, violent death tends to be more closely associated with the criminal justice system, and effective public health interventions to lower its numbers are scarce.

That could change.

The agency's National Violent Death Reporting System is a "very needed and valuable program," AMA Executive Director Michael Maves, MD, told CDC Director Julie Gerberding, MD, MPH, in an Aug. 13 letter.

Experts in the injury prevention field echo this view.

"I personally think this is going to be a tremendously important undertaking as the number of states is increased and this becomes a national system," said Jon Vernick, associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-director of Hopkins' Center for Gun Policy and Research.

"For the first time ever we're going to have really good, detailed information about homicides and incredibly rich information about suicide, which we never had before," said David Hemenway, PhD, professor of health policy at Harvard School of Public Health.