What are some good sources for mortality statistics for Americans? For example, where would I go to find out how many Americans die each year from car accidents or lightning strikes? How about more smoking deaths or offbeat stuff like bee stings?
I've listed the major sources to consult for US death data/statistics.
Births, deaths, marriages, and divorces are all part of the US Vital Statistics, which are published by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).
- Death Data http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm From NCHS Faststats, will link you to a number of resources on death statistics.
- National Vital Statistics Reports, Deaths, final data for 2002 has detailed causes of death tables, which include "transport" (vehicular, water, air) deaths and "accidents" (unintentional injuries). (available on the Death Data page) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_05acc.pdf
-Mortality Data from the NCHS gives sources and methodology for collecting this data: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/mortdata.htm
---Part of this page is The International Classification of Diseases is the manual "used to code and classify mortality data from death certificates." See: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/icd9.htm You can consult this to see how bee stings, lightning strikes, etc. may be coded, then use the codes to find the numbers in the published data. It looks like ICD-10 is the latest release. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/icd10des.htm
-Medline plus is a great resource for health information and even statistics. They link you to both government and non-government reports, sources, factsheets, etc. (e.g. National Heart Assn) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/medlineplus.html
-Medline plus also has health statistics page, many of the resources link you back to National Center for Health Statistics. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/healthstatistics.html
-For quick tables, you can consult the Statistical Abstract of the US (published by the Bureau of the Census) http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS2878
--Select your year, then,see: Section 2. Vital Statistics. Look at the source information for each table to find specific reports from which the stats were taken.
For "off-beat" deaths, like bee-stings and lightning strike, try looking at Fatal and Non-Fatal Injury information or Unitentional Injuries.
-Surveillance for Fatal and Nonfatal Injuries --- United States http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5307a1.htm Gives some background information about bites and stings: "The 22 mechanism of nonfatal injury categories includes a category for Dog Bite and Other Bite/sting."
-Try searching CDC Wonder to see if there are any reports on these types of death. CDC Wonder indexes health reports and stats: http://wonder.cdc.gov/welcome.html
-You can also search the Morbidity/Mortality Weekly Reports to see if these topics were covered, they often contain statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwrsrch.htm
I found the following MMWR report on Lightning-associated deaths in the US 1985-1995. The report gives the number of deaths + background information + sources of data and info. MMWR May 22, 1998/ 47(19); 391-394 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00052833.htm
-Lastly, Pubmed can be used to search for secondary material/articles published on causes of death. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed