Largely as a result of reductions in job-related homicides and electrocutions, the number of fatal work injuries fell in 1996 to 6,112, the lowest level in the five-year history of the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, conducted by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, U.S. Department of Labour. The downward trend in the past two years reversed the increases reported in 1993 and 1994. (See table 1.) Job-related electrocutions dropped 20 percent, and homicides fell 12 percent from 1995 to 1996. In contrast, fatalities from falls to lower levels continued to rise, reaching a five-year high. Half of the fatal falls occurred in the construction industry. This release profiles these and other fatal work injuries by type of event, occupation, industry, demographic characteristics of the worker, and state where injury occurred. For a fatality to be included in the census, the decedent must have been employed (that is working for pay, compensation, or profit) at the time of the event, engaged in a legal work activity, or present at the site of the incident as a requirement of his or her job. These criteria are generally broader than those used by federal and state agencies administering specific laws and regulations. (Fatalities that occur during a person's commute to or from work are excluded from the census counts.) Data presented in this release include deaths occurring in 1996 that resulted from traumatic occupational injuries. An injury is defined as any intentional or unintentional wound or damage to the body resulting from acute exposure to energy, such as heat, electricity, or kinetic energy from a crash or from the absence of such essentials as heat or oxygen caused by a specific event, incident, or series of events within a single workday or shift. Included are open wounds, intracranial and internal injuries, heat stroke, hypothermia, asphyxiations, acute poisonings resulting from short-term exposures limited to the worker's shift, suicides and homicides, and work injuries listed as underlying or contributory causes of death. Information on work-related fatal illnesses are not reported in the BLS census and are excluded from the attached tables because the latency period of many occupational illnesses and the difficulty of linking illnesses to work make identification of a universe problematic. Partial information on fatal occupational illnesses, compiled separately, is available in BLS Report 913. (A)
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