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Robert Leonard Goldberg, MD, MSOM
City of Los Angeles (Calif) Personnel Department Occupational Health and Safety Division

JAMA. 1990;264(21):2737.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor. —

One of a series of useful articles derived from the National Traumatic Occupational Fatality surveillance project was recently published.¹ Bell et al emphasize the inherent difficulty in obtaining an accurate enumeration of occupational fatalities. Unfortunately, the authors make an error in the denominator that can cause large underestimations. Their rates are expressed per "100 000 workers" rather than per 100 000 person-years worked. The former denominator fails to adjust for the high prevalence of part-time workers in the youngest age groups. In a study of California occupational fatalities,² we used average workweek data from the 1980 census to show that this error would result in an underestimation of fatality rates by 37% in the youngest group. In fact, using person-years as denominators, we found that 16- to 24-year-olds had the highest rate of fatal injuries from industrial accidents related to Occupational Safety and Health . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West), and Don Riesenberg, MD, Senior Editor.

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