Many people associate deadly fires with poor families and crowded, big-city neighborhoods.
Indeed, a new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that young children in poor areas are six times more likely than other children to die in a fire. But the same study shows that the deaths are by no means limited to the city. In fact, young children in rural areas are almost three times more likely than young children in cities to die in a fire. The researchers examined the death certificates of all Missouri children who died in household fires between 1990 and 1995. In rural areas, about nine in every 100,000 children under age 5 died in a fire each year, compared with just over three fire-related deaths per 100,000 young children in the cities.