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# Fire Injury Risk

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##### In this section

                - Reports
                - Death & Injury Risk                   - States
                  - Children
                  - Older Adults
                  - Injury Risk
                - Residential Fires
                - Nonresidential Fires
                - Outside & Vehicle Fires
                - Firefighter Fatalities
                - Fire Department Registry
                - State Statistics
                - Data Sets

## In 2021:

People ages 85 or older had the highest fire injury rate and risk of fire injury.

Children ages 5-9 had the lowest fire injury rate and risk of fire injury.

Fire injuries by gender:
                    - Females:  38.6%
                    - Males:  61.4%

## Fire injuries by age, injury rate and relative risk of injury (2021)

### National fire injury rate in 2021: 44.3 per million population

Notes:
                  - Data were adjusted to account for unknown or unspecified ages.
                  - The National Fire Protection Association estimated 14,700 civilian fire injuries in 2021.

Sources: National Fire Incident Reporting System, National Fire Protection Association and U.S. Census Bureau

## Understanding this information

Although many regional factors, such as climate, poverty, education and demographics, affect fire issues in the United States, one of the most useful ways to compare fire injuries across groups of people is to look at their relative risk of injury in a fire.

## What is relative risk?

Relative risk compares the per capita rate of a particular group to the overall per capita rate (for example, the U.S. general population). The relative risk of the overall U.S. population is always set at 1.

Here is an example that shows how relative risk is used to compare fire injuries:
                  - The relative risk of a child ages 5 to 9 being injured in a fire in 2021 was 0.3. This means that a child was 70% less likely to be injured in a fire than the overall U.S. population.

## What does per capita mean?

To account for population differences, per capita rates are used. Per capita rates use a common population size, which then permits comparisons between different groups. Per capita rates are determined by the number of injuries occurring to a specific population group divided by the total population for that group. This ratio is then multiplied by a common population size.

For the purposes of this analysis, per capita rates for fire injuries are measured per 1 million persons. For example, the 2021 per capita fire injury rate for the total older adult (ages 65 and over) population is computed from the total number of older adult fire injuries (2,854) divided by the total older adult population (56,229,126) multiplied by 1,000,000 persons. This rate is equivalent to 50.8 injuries per 1 million population.

Page last reviewed: Aug. 2, 2023

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