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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Any particular reason US citizens are having so many fatal injuries at a young age though?

Is the accident rate higher than (say) Canada and Australia, or is the prognosis for recovery after an injury so much worse?

Here in Australia in my youth we jumped out of aircraft and helicopters, from one moving vehicle into another on dirt roads, jumped 40 ft off of deep water jetties into shark infested waters, climbed into crushers on mine sites to unbog them, washed live HV power lines in faraday suits risking jump over, played with snakes, ... all the fun stuff and despite that my generation has 10 years greater life expectancy from birth than my US cohort generation.

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One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles. There are a bunch of historical and cultural reasons for this mostly related to agriculture, but you could get permits at age 14 and I seem to recall people driving as young as 12 in restricted agricultural contexts when I was growing up. Most start at 15-16. They also tend to do stupid things in cars when young (because young). Multiple people I knew as a child living in agricultural country died very young in vehicular accidents.

I don’t know how much of this is relevant in 2023. I suspect driving is more restricted than when I was a child. The other major factor is the crime gang warfare that tends to kill a lot of young men. Most Americans will never intersect this subset of the population but it is a major source of skew in longevity statistics.

For better or worse, if you survive into your mid-30s, Americans have a long life expectancy. There are significant sub-populations for who those early years are significant filters.

> One of the largest outliers is vehicular accidents. Americans drive from an early age and drive a lot of miles.

Australia is kind of big and kind of sparse (check map) and has cars; I live in a state 3x larger than Texas and drove 40 km to high school 5 days a week (and back again in the afternoon), and travelled > 1,000 km to reach the nearest university.

It's true that USofA citizens have more fatalities per driver mile which does prompt a 'why?' - poor signage, no seatbelts, chronic attention deficit ??

Indigenous Australians haver lower life expectancy and higher fatalities at younger ages.

It is a good question, I don’t have answers without digging in further. It isn’t signage or seatbelts. I don’t want to project when I was young on the situation today. Things were extremely “adventurous” when I was growing up, it is a wonder any of us survived (and some didn’t). With all the helicopter parenting now, at least in the middle to upper-middle class, you might expect that to be reduced but I have no idea.

The rate of fatal injuries are definitely still an anomalous thing for young people in the US.

Well Texas has more people traveling on roads like Farm to Market roads which very frequently two lanes, no median or other barrier separating two cars traveling in opposing directions, each at 70-80mph. There are often large pickup trucks on these roads too, which doesn't help at all. Australia is 11 times bigger than Texas yet has 86% of the population. Assuming he's in Victoria, which is the state that most closely matches 3x the size of Texas, there would be 2 million people in an area the size of Texas. From what I can see, the drunk driving rate is similar; There's a lot more for drunk people to hit in Texas. Most of their speed limits on the highway are, according to Wikipedia, between 50-70mph.In Texas, 75mph is common between major cities, and even on those aforementioned farm-to-market roads which are everywhere. 80 is posted in 10 counties in west Texas, and we've got an 85mph signed road southeast of Austin. I got passed by a cop going about 100. I was going about 100, to be clear.

I think in US you do not need to attend driving school in order to get license. Is it same for Australia?

Yes.

Australia requires you to take a driving test - a "written" largely multi choice test to demonstrate understanding of road rules, success there gives you [L] learner plates that allow you to drive under supervision and practice. You then have to pass a practical driving test to gain [P] probationary plates for unassisted driving with some restrictions - after a year or so you're a full driver.

No driving school is required - but it can help if you don't have access to a cool calm collected experienced driver who can walk you the skills test - reversing, parallel park, correct signalling, emergency stop, etc.

Depends on the state.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the US. That is not the case in other wealthy countries. According to this article

https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/child-a...

Fentanyl makes a much larger impact. There were around 14,000 non-suicide firearm deaths in 2018, the most recent year with stats. Fentanyl killed around 110,000 in 2022.

Both issues disproportionately affect small segments of the population though, rather than being general hazards. Driving deaths for example tend to be more evenly distributed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_S...

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176830906/overdose-death-202...

I think we get an apparent contradiction because of how we stratify the data. According to the CDC/KFF study, firearms are still the leading cause of death for people age 1-19, and substance use is only 6th in the list for that age group. If you instead interpret "young age" as another age range, then indeed other causes of death may appear more prevalent.

Some of their metrics include adults ages 18-19, not just children. Still a serious problem, but the headline is deceptive.

How is the headline deceptive? If you can trust the source, the statistic holds for individuals aged 1-17, as is written in the first sentence: "In 2020 and 2021, firearms contributed to the deaths of more children ages 1-17 years in the U.S. than any other type of injury or illness"

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