President Biden has also referred to the increase in gun violence in the United States as a "gun violence epidemic" several times, including on National Gun Violence Awareness Day. "And that has been the case for gun violence, sadly, in our country for a long time." "Whenever you have a large number of people dying from preventable reasons that constitutes a public health crisis," he told NPR's Here and Now in January. The top public health official in the country, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, has long called the deaths and injuries from firearms an "epidemic." The label - which has been applied to infectious diseases as well as things like opioid addiction - creates a sense of emergency or crisis. Because COVID-19 spread around the world, it was considered a pandemic. Health Firearms overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death in children The "epidemic" label and what it meansįor those charged with protecting public health in the United States, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an epidemic is defined as a sudden outbreak or an unexpected spike in an illness in a single country or area. Since the mid-2000s, the United States has seen year-after-year increases in the number of deaths and injuries from guns "that would mirror what we would consider to be a sudden increase consistent with an epidemic," Carter said. "When we think about what the term epidemic means, it means a sudden increase in the numbers, or incidents, of an event over what would be considered a baseline level," Carter told Morning Edition. "I would certainly consider the problem of firearm injuries and firearm violence as an epidemic in the United States," said Patrick Carter, director of the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, whose research is partly funded by the National Institutes of Health. Six months into the year, more than 21,000 people have died because of gun-related injuries in the United States.ĭoctors and public health officials have a word to describe the rising number of people killed or hurt by guns in recent years: epidemic.
0 kommentar(er)
