KILLER SITE SLICES AND DICES FIGURES

By: Charles Bowen Death Can Make For Great Stories



To see mortality statistics by region, visit http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars.



What's the leading cause of death in your state? How does it compare to
neighboring states, the region, and the nation as a whole?



Is the rate of suicide among your teen-agers rising or declining? How
about the total number of firearm-related deaths or number of senior
citizens who are killed in traffic accidents each year on the streets
and roads of your state?



Have you heard that the rate of death by heart disease or cancer might
be higher in your part of the country than elsewhere? Where can you
research something like that?



Are the leading causes of death in your region different for men than
they are for women? For African Americans? For Hispanics? For what age
groups does homicide appear to be an inordinately high death factor?
And has that rate changed significantly over the past decade and a
half?



How many of your citizens die in residential fires each year? Or drown?
Or succumb to adverse reactions to medicines? Or die in motorcycle
accidents?



It used to be that to get stories like these in your news columns, you
pretty much had to wait until they were delivered to you via press
releases from some state government bean counters who had been
crunching numbers delivered to them by federal statisticians.



But, as usual, the Web has not only put the raw data into your hands
but also given you some powerful tools to slice and dice it.



A new site from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
enables you to search for customized injury-related mortality data. To
use the resource, visit the site at http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars
and click a link to one of two main pages:



? The 'Mortality Tables' interface, where you can select among several
options to view injury deaths and death rates for specific injuries. It
provides tabulations of the total numbers of injury-related deaths and
the death rates per 100,000 population. The reports list deaths
according to mechanism/cause and manner/intent of injury, and you can
sort the data by state, race, sex, and/or age group.



? The 'Leading Causes of Death' interface, where you can select among a
number of modifiers to produce lists of injury-related deaths relative
to the number of other leading causes of death in the United States or
in individual states.



Both reports also allow you to sort the statistics by U.S. Census
region, including the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. Data
currently on-line date from 1981 to 1997. The information is updated
annually by the National Cen-ter for Health Statistics, which produces
mortality data for a given year about 18 months after the year ends.
That means that the 1998 stats should be online by this summer.



Other considerations in using the CDC's WISQARS (Web-based Injury
Statistics Query and Reporting System) site for your reporting and
editing:



1. Besides customizing data from the two CDC reports, you also can
examine pre-existing 'Fact Sheets' on various topics. Click the 'Facts'
link at the bottom of the introductory page, then select from the
resulting screen a topic of interest, ranging from subjects such as
'Adolescent Injury,' 'Bicycle-Related Injury,' and 'Child Passenger
Safety' to 'Rape,' 'Suicide in the United States,' and 'Youth Violence
in the United States.' The resulting reports provide the latest
national statistics, risk factors, and answers to frequently asked
questions.



2. You also can search several different health statistics resources
from the site's introductory page. Click the 'Search' icon at the top
of the screen to reach a form to search material from the CDC by word
or phrase. You can use AND, OR, or NOT as logical connectors and
examples of queries are listed at the bottom of the page. Also on that
page is a link to search records from state agencies throughout the
nation. And on the introductory page is a query box for searching the
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.



3. For additional information about the reports and how to use them,
click the 'Help' link on the upper left side of the site's introductory
display. You will be taken to a screen of definitions and elaborations,
as well as a link to the site's FAQ (frequently asked questions) page.