Shocker! Big cities are safer than rural towns
Jul 23, 2013, 4:32 PM
Despite the killings, car crashes and haboobs in the Valley, it turns out you’re safer living here than Minot, North Dakota, according to a new study.
According to NBC News, the study done by the University of Pennsylvania has debunked the ancient myth that living among cattle was actually safer than living with your roommate.
The study shows the risk of death from an injury— including shootings, vehicle accidents, drownings, falls and many other accidents — is more than 20 percent higher in rural small towns than larger cities.
Dr. Sage Myers, author of the study, said that people tend to look at the homicide rate, or the number of killings in a city, to base how safe a particular city is. But as it turns out, people are dying because of unintentional mishaps.
Although homicide rates are indeed higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury-related deaths is a full 40 percent higher in rural areas than in urban areas.
The study analyzed more than 1 million injury-related deaths between 1999 and 2006 based on a federal database that used death certificate information from all over the country.
What did they find?
The most common causes of injury-related deaths: motor vehicle crashes. In most rural areas there were 27.61 vehicle-related deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 10.58 deaths per 100,000 people in most urban areas, according to the study.
The study was published on Tuesday in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
