Analysis of characteristics and forecast of unintentional injury deaths of children under age 5 from 2013 to 2019 in Sichuan, China

OBJECTIVE: Through the study of death characteristics and trend prediction, it is hoped that key populations, regions and seasons can be identified, thereby providing evidence support for the efficient prevention and control management of unintentional injury deaths. METHOD: We collected information on 8630 unintentional deaths of children under age 5 from local surveillance systems, analyzed by chi-square test and predicted by the seasonal ARIMA model. RESULTS: About 33.1% of child deaths were under the age of 1, 60.5% were boys, 37.6% were in urban areas, 2.6% were among ethnic Tibetans, 6.8% were among ethnic Yi, and 46.6% died inside houses. The top three of total deaths were accidental drowning (35.0%), accidental suffocation (32.7%) and traffic accident (15.5%). The ratio of males to females in traffic accidents (1.28:1) and poisoning (1.30:1) deaths was relatively lower than accidental falls (1.62:1) and drowning (1.85:1). The causes of death ratio in rural and urban areas were: drowning (1.83:1), poisoning (1.75:1), suffocation (1.62:1), traffic (1.41:1), and falling (1.24:1). Children's deaths of ethnic minority groups of Tibetan and Yi increased year by year (χ(2)=75.261, P< 0.001). Tibetan and Yi groups had the most deaths in summer, and Han in winter (χ(2)=29.093, P< 0.001). Accidental suffocation accounted for 78.2 percent of the total unintentional deaths of children under age 1. And drowning accounted for only 2.4 percent. The model SERIMA (1, 1, 2) (2, 0, 0) [12] is suitable for describing and predicting unintentional injury deaths of children under age 5. CONCLUSION: We should combine death surveillance with qualitative investigation or in-depth quantitative investigation to further analyze unintentional injury deaths in children.