Agreed, wasn't that surprised when I read this today. People have been safer in cities, generally, for 5000 years.
Conclusion: Using total injury death rate as an overall safety metric, US urban counties were safer than their rural counterparts, and injury death risk increased steadily as counties became more rural. Greater emphasis on elevated injury-related mortality risk outside of large cities, attention to locality-specific injury prevention priorities, and an increased focus on matching emergency care needs to emergency care resources are in order.
The first comment to this article sums everything up rather nicely. Somebody took a study performed for the medical profession to gauge where and how often accident related death occurred so they could better plan to handle the load of such care, and twisted it to read that the city is safer than the country. The study he is quoting, doesn't even begin to answer this question, let alone address it.
Basically you are more likely to die from a serious injury in rural areas. Not that urban areas are safer.
Not a surprise at all, though the conclusion is somewhat twisted. But, it does agree that in the countryside, you're safer from crime. Beyond that, it comes down to the relative dangers involved in the activities you willingly take part in. Wild guess: a much higher percentage of people living in the countryside hunt than people from the cities - so, hunting injury/death statistics will likely be skewed in that direction. Ditto huge swaths of other activities. And driving deaths? Look at the differences in speed limits.
edit: why did I say wild guess - it wasn't really a guess - I know more females who hunt than some of you have ever talked to.
Maybe this is a semantic thing, but isn't "safety" directly related to how likely you are to get injured/die? If not, what do you mean by "safer"?
There's roosters laying chickens and chickens layin' eggs
Farm machinery eating people's arms and legs
I wasn't hurtin' nobody
I wasn't hurtin' no one
-- John Prine
Not a surprise at all, though the conclusion is somewhat twisted. But, it does agree that in the countryside, you're safer from crime. Beyond that, it comes down to the relative dangers involved in the activities you willingly take part in. Wild guess: a much higher percentage of people living in the countryside hunt than people from the cities - so, hunting injury/death statistics will likely be skewed in that direction. Ditto huge swaths of other activities. And driving deaths? Look at the differences in speed limits.
edit: why did I say wild guess - it wasn't really a guess - I know more females who hunt than some of you have ever talked to.
Did anyone click on the link and actually read this study before getting pissed off at this second hand account? The study was commissioned by the Annual of Emergency Medicine with the purpose of gathering information regarding the current state of injury related deaths and what that might mean for people who, in a nutshell, allocate emergency resources. It's not a question of "city/rural living is better" as everyone seems to be making it out to be. The editor's summary conclusion for their audience is "although not directly relevant to clinical care, these data support improving access to trauma centers in rural areas, as well as continued violence prevention efforts in all locales." If you think that message sounds a lot different than, "flock to the cities everybody! country living is for fools with a deathwish!" it's because it is a lot different.
Everyone speaking flaws in the study because of crime rate needs to cool down. It's not measuring crime, it's measuring injury related deaths.
Want an example about what the study treats as a non-polarizing data point? How about that the rate of firearm related deaths in the city is no different than the country. In the city, it's mostly homicides of males between 20 and 44. In the country its mostly accidents involving children and people over the age of 45. The rates are comparable, the causes aren't. Wonder why they don't care about the distinction between the two? Because this is a study for the Annual of Emergency Medicine. They just don't care why the person in front of them has a bullet in them, it's not relevant to what they were trying to measure. They measure how often it happens so they can make an educated judgement about how they might improve quality of care. The study isn't insulting your choice of lifestyle or even making implications as to which is more beneficial to society as whole. It's simply stating that they wanted to measure the rate of injury related deaths between rural and urban areas, and this is what we found.
Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/...-are-the-safest-places-to-live/#ixzz2a4hkSiRk
As any Study, it's flawed.
The other interesting point I would like to see is a bullseye kind of grid that shows your chance of (accidental)death the further away you get from a city center.
I'd wager that there is some major overlap between the 'burbs on the outter crust of the city limits and up to 20 or so miles outside of that. Get past that point where your are 20+ minutes away from the edge of a major city and that accidental death range starts going up much faster.
Sheer # of cars/people amongst many other things makes City more dangerous.
Even if "statistics" or #s tell you otherwise.
I'd rather see a zone chance of death, break large cities up in zones too, so people can see which places are safest to live (either due to crime or hospital response).
People try, but you just can't. They're always on the prowl - even threshers can't handle a purely vegetarian diet.So in rural areas if you drive carefully and avoid wheat threshers you can theoretically live forever?
Sheer # of cars/people amongst many other things makes City more dangerous.