Putting Dog Bite Statistics into Perspective

There's always a lot of media attention when somone gets bitten and severely injured or worse killed by a dog. But when you think about the number of dogs in daily contact with people and some of the situations we put them in it's clear that on the whole dogs have stunning self control and amazing tolerance.

The following is in no way intended to suggest that dog bites are not serious situations and that serious injuries or death should be ignored, just put down to statistics or that we can't learn something from every incident. Having said that though it can often be hard to keep these things in some sort of perspective once the media gets involved. I think bites and the potential for them are a risk living with dogs. I also think it an important enough topic for a topic of its own in Paws for Thought.

So for your consideration the following info comes from a book by Janis Bradley called 'Dogs Bite. But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous' which was published in 2005 and is the result of research and up to 15 years of statistics in the US and internationally. I'm sure however that many of the key points also apply here.

• Fatal dog attacks are fantastically rare (one of the things that makes them so newsworthy). In the US you are five times more likely to be killed by lightening and four times more likely to be killed by a forklift.
    
• Looking at fatal injuries to children over a 15 year period it was the following average number of deaths per year occured:
• 10 from dogs (and yes 10 too many)
• 11 from balloons
• 15 from playground equipment
• 22 from five gallon buckets
• and a staggering 826 due to the actions of human caregivers.
    
• When you look at accidental deaths for all age groups for a four year period the numbers fall something like:
• 16 from dogs
• 774 from bicycles
• 791 from guns 
• 3,334 from drowning
• 3,410 from fires
• 5,555 from choking
• 14,142 from poisons
• 14,818 from falls
• 43,730 from cars.
    
• Accidental injuries treated in emergency departments over a 3 year period identified:
• 4.3 million sports related injuries
• 340,784 dog related injuries.
   
• Or to look at it in more detail:
• 340,784 dogs
• 504,627 bikes
• 519,174 poison
• 619,148 foreign bodies
• 909,688 other bites (including from people)
• 2,328,766 sharp objects
• 3,366,270 over exertion
• 3,990,652 cars
• 4,507,554 blunt objects
• 7,714,167 falls.
   
• Now for the slippers and some household furniture stats:
   
• In the UK over a 3 year period 62,743 people were treated for injuries caused by dogs. 64,974 for slipper related injuries. 198,670 for shoe related and 214,646 for sneaker related injuries. Even going barefoot didn't help with that maxing out at 423,835 injuries.
    
• In a US 2003 report each piece of household furniture caused more injuries than dogs. Beware your dining suite at over 600,000 injuries treated at emergency rooms associated with tables and chairs. The bed wasn't even safe with just over 500,000 injuries. Doors came in at just over 400,000 and dogs at approximately 300,000.
    
• Other ways of looking at the seriousness of dog bites are to:
   
• look at the severity of the bites. A number of reports in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000's showed that according the the Injury Severity Score (ISS) which ranks injuries in terms of threat to life dog bites were fairly constant at:
• No injury - 92.4%
• Minor injury - 7.5%
• Moderate - Serious injury - 0.076%.
   
• compare level and type of hospitalisation (where this was required):
• Severity: Dog bites averaged 1.5 on the Injury severity score (which ranks tp 16+). Falls averge approx 6.2
• Hospitalisation: Dog bites averaged approx 3.2 days in hospital. Falls averaged in excess of 7 days.
• Cost of treatment: Dog bites averaged approx $7,000 per patient. Falls averaged $13,000 per patient.
   
• Incidents per number of animals. In this case ER treated injuries to humans per million dogs in the population:
• For every million dogs approx 5,000 people were treated for dog-related injuries every year
• For every million horses approx 10,000 horse related injuries were treated.
   
• Fatalities to humans (per million animals):
• For every million horses there were approx 2.16 human fatalities a year
• For every million dogs there was approx 1 human fatality a year
• For every million cattle there was also approx 1 human fatility - but cattle have less contact with people than dogs.

And now for some Australian info from the Delta Society Australia website (http://www.deltasocietyaustralia.com.au/dog_safe.htm )

• It is estimated that each year dogs bite more than 100,000 Australians with varying degrees of severity. Most bites occur because neither adults nor children have been educated about appropriate behaviour around dogs or how to read dogs’ body language.
   
• Approximately 16,000 seek treatment in the Accident & Emergency Departments of the nation's public hospitals. In the financial year 2001-2002 more than 2,300 had injuries severe enough to warrant hospitalisation and reconstructive surgery.
   
• Two out of every three bites involve the family, neighbour or friend's pet dog 'in the backyard' and almost 50% of all serious bites occurring in children under ten years of age.

Note thought that there can be immense problems using dog bite stats because of a range of factors including:

• Changing reporting requirements so that data is not necessarily comparable over time
• No one defined standard for reporting the type and seriousness of bites (a future post will give you a look at just one of these)
• The number of bites that go unreported
• The difficulty and known errors in identifying breed once you get to breed specific or even type reporting.

Future Paws for Thoughts Posts will look at some ways to help reduce the risk of dog bites through learning to read dog body language, ideas for kids and dogs and more.