Fatal Injuries

This website provides county and health district data for specific types of fatal injuries. Fatal injuries are accidents, self-harm, assaults or other external causes that lead to death. Specifically, these are deaths resulting from bodily harm that can be caused by fires, motor vehicle crashes, drowning, sharp objects, firearms, suffocation, falling, poisoning and more. Injuries may be unintentional, self-related harm or assault-related. This data includes medical mistakes, though these deaths are suspected to be under-reported.

Injury Matrix Framework: In the Michigan death records, causes of death are categorized using ICD-10 codes; the ICD-10 codes are grouped into broader categories according to the NCHS ICD Injury Matrix Framework (e.g., ICD–10 codes W75–W84 are used to indicate deaths due to unintentional suffocation). These categories may be viewed at the National Center of Health Statistics Tools and Frameworks website; an ICD-10 cause of death grouping table is also provided on the Michigan state fatal injury website.

Options: You may view a fatal injury table by selecting a cause on the left side of the page. Gender and type of rate (crude or age-adjusted) can be selected using the options toward the bottom. In order to insure that the rates and other data are statistically reliable, the data may be censored for smaller populations. In cases of trends, you may be able to display less censored data by selecting a greater time period (single, three or five-year). In order to insure statistical reliability, rates by age are only shown as five-year averages. Numbers of specific causes of fatal injury by age are not shown in the community section.