A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points to a worrying increase in the numbers of accidental deaths, homicides and suicides among America’s youth, CNN reported.
The total death rate for 10- to 19-year-olds in the United States declined 33 percent between 1999 and 2013 — but then suddenly jumped 12 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to the report from the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC.
The report, released last week, pinned the spike to injury-related deaths from traffic accident fatalities, drug overdoses, homicides and suicides, as opposed to illness, CNN reported.
According to the CDC, the leading causes of death among 15-to-19 year olds in the United States are due to unintentional injuries — car crash death accounted for 62 percent of those — followed by suicide and homicide.
"This should not be happening and bucks the trend that we as a country have experienced in the past several decades. We should be worried about this," Thomas Weiser, a trauma surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center told CNN.
According to the data, suicide rates after declines over the years among 10- to 19-year-olds increased by 56 percent, going up to 6.1 in 2016. The three leading methods of suicide that year were suffocation, firearms and poisoning.
As for homicides, the data showed that after recent declines, they rose 27 percent to 4.7 per 100,000 in 2016. Among the leading methods of homicide were firearms and cutting or piercing.
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