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Cattle have been identified as leading sources of injuries to agricultural workers. The present study focused on worker injuries that involved the interaction of cattle, cattle handlers, and farm structures or equipment. The goal of the study was to identify opportunities for injury prevention. We examined 221 reports of injury to cattle handlers from the Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). Expected interactions led to many of the cattle-handling injuries reported in the NEISS database. In almost 30% of cases, cattle pushed workers into structures such as fences, gates, posts, and walls. In another 16% to 19% of injuries, cattle struck gates and other objects, propelling them at the victims. The present research makes several important contributions to the study of cattle-handling injuries. First, the research supports an increased emphasis on the development of safer gate designs (e.g., gates that are remotely operated or that absorb energy to limit the speed at which they may be propelled by animals). Second, the research suggests a need for additional study of energy-absorbing fence and wall structures. We view these two points to be of significance because gates and associated structures (e.g., posts, fences, and walls) accounted for 45% of the injuries in the dataset, based on the associated injury narrative. Finally, the research identifies a previously unexplored source of agricultural injury data, namely the NEISS database.

Introduction: Acute work-related trauma is a leading cause of death and disability among U.S. workers. Occupational health services researchers have described the pressing need to identify valid injury severity measures for purposes such as case-mix adjustment and the construction of appropriate comparison groups in programme evaluation, intervention, quality improvement, and outcome studies. The objective of this study was to compare the performance of several injury severity scores and scoring methods in the context of predicting work-related disability and medical cost outcomes., Methods: Washington State Trauma Registry (WTR) records for injuries treated from 1998 to 2008 were linked with workers' compensation claims. Several Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS)-based injury severity measures (ISS, New ISS, maximum AIS) were estimated directly from ICD-9-CM codes using two software packages: (1) ICDMAP-90, and (2) Stata's user-written ICDPIC programme (ICDPIC). ICDMAP-90 and ICDPIC scores were compared with existing WTR scores using the Akaike Information Criterion, amount of variance explained, and estimated effects on outcomes. Competing risks survival analysis was used to evaluate work disability outcomes. Adjusted total medical costs were modelled using linear regression., Results: The linked sample contained 6052 work-related injury events. There was substantial agreement between WTR scores and those estimated by ICDMAP-90 (kappa=0.73), and between WTR scores and those estimated by ICDPIC (kappa=0.68). Work disability and medical costs increased monotonically with injury severity, and injury severity was a significant predictor of work disability and medical cost outcomes in all models. WTR and ICDMAP-90 scores performed better with regard to predicting outcomes than did ICDPIC scores, but effect estimates were similar. Of the three severity measures, maxAIS was usually weakest, except when predicting total permanent disability., Conclusions: Injury severity was significantly associated with work disability and medical cost outcomes for work-related injuries. Injury severity can be estimated using either ICDMAP-90 or ICDPIC when ICD-9-CM codes are available. We observed little practical difference between severity measures or scoring methods. This study demonstrated that using existing software to estimate injury severity may be useful to enhance occupational injury surveillance and research., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The factors driving the rapid increase in US medical spending are a concern for both policymakers and payers. This article analyzes variation in spending growth rates for a large sample of persons with workplace injuries. We analyze trends by type and age of injury, and by type of provider. Medical spending growth ranged from 2 percent to 12 percent for different injuries, and 3 percent to 16 percent across different types of providers. We decomposed spending growth into price, volume, and service intensity growth rates. Service intensity accounts for 20 percent of overall expenditure growth, but is a particularly large and variable contributor to spending growth in inpatient services, ranging from 35 percent to 73 percent of total spending growth among the four most prevalent injuries we studied. Efforts to forecast spending, and to design policies that manage spending growth, should account for heterogeneous trends across patients and providers.

In the past century, the United States farming industry has changed dramatically. Farming and food production have grown tremendously, and large industrial farms are now commonplace. Despite this, small farms located in rural communities continue to make up a majority of this country's agriculture. Farmers work with large machinery, large animals, and agricultural chemicals and fertilizers. These potential hazards, combined with rigorous work, long hours, and the natural environment cause higher rates of work-related injury, trauma, and illnesses than in most professions. This article discusses common injuries sustained in the farming industry as well as the challenges radiologic technologists face when diagnostic imaging is needed.

Background: The American Academy of Underwater Science (AAUS) constitutes the single largest pool of organizations with scientific diving programmes in North America. Members submit annual summaries of diving activity and any related incidents., Methods: All diving records for a 10-year period between January 1998 and December 2007 were reviewed. Incidents were independently classified or reclassified by a four-person panel with expertise in scientific diving and diving safety using a previously published protocol. Subsequent panel discussion produced a single consensus classification of each case., Results: A total of 95 confirmed incidents were reported in conjunction with 1,019,159 scientific dives, yielding an overall incidence of 0.93/10,000 person-dives. A total of 33 cases were determined to involve decompression illness (DCI), encompassing both decompression sickness and air embolism. The incidence of DCI was 0.324/10,000 person-dives, substantially lower than the rates of 0.9-35.3/10,000 published for recreational, instructional/guided, commercial and/or military diving., Conclusions: Scientific diving safety may be facilitated by a combination of relatively high levels of training and oversight, the predominance of shallow, no-decompression diving and, possibly, low pressure to complete dives under less than optimal circumstances.