Personal Injury Statistics

Injury statistics might surprise some not familiar with the common occurence of accident and injury. Injury lawyers are very busy because of how common injuries and accidents have become. Consider the following information from The National Safety Council. If you've been injured you should speak to a lawyer to be sure your rights are protected.

The one-year odds of dying ranged from about 1 in 6,000 in a transportation accident to about 1 in 45,000,000 from a spider bite. Lifetime odds of dying from any unintentional cause are about 1 in 36.

• The odds of dying from an injury in 2005 were 1 in 1,681.
• The lifetime odds of dying from an injury for a person born in 2005 were 1 in 22.

Motor Vehicle and Transportation Personal Injury Statistics

More than 6 million police-reported motor vehicle crashes occurred in the United States in 2007. Nearly 30 percent of those crashes (1.71 million) resulted in an personal injury, and fewer than 1 percent (37,248) resulted in a death.

Fatal crashes decreased by 3.6 percent from 2006 to 2007, and the fatality rate dropped to 1.36 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel in 2007.

In general, buses, trains, and airlines have much lower death rates than automobiles and auto accidents when the risk is expressed as passenger deaths per passenger mile of travel. (Automobile drivers are considered passengers but operators and crew of planes, trains, and buses are not.) In 2000, the passenger death ratio in automobiles was 0.80 per 100 million passenger-miles. The rates for buses, trains, and airlines were 0.05, 0.03, and 0.02, respectively.

On the Job Injury Statistics

In terms of death rates by industries, the mining industry topped the death rates in 2001 with 31.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers, beating agricultural with 21.3, construction with 13.3, manufacturing with 3.3, transportation and public utilities with 11.4, trade (includes retail and wholesale trade) with 1.7, services (includes finance, insurance, and real estate) with 1.4, and government with 2.4. However, between 1912 and 2001, unintentional work deaths per 100,000 population were reduced 90%.

Drunk Driving Injury Statistics

In 2006, 13,470 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (32%) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.

Traumatic Brain Injury Statistics

TBIs contribute to a substantial number of deaths and cases of permanent disability annually.

Of the 1.4 million who sustain a TBI each year in the United States:

• 50,000 die;
• 235,000 are hospitalized; and
• 1.1 million are treated and released from an emergency department.1

Among children ages 0 to 14 years, TBI results in an estimated:

• 2,685 deaths;
• 37,000 hospitalizations; and
• 435,000 emergency department visits annually.