It's a good bet your news organization will soon be doing the quick-hit pool opening story. Why not add depth to an otherwise shallow story? You can do that – and many other stories – with U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) death and injury data. The data should be manageable for anybody with a basic knowledge of software such as Microsoft Access, and you can get a decade's worth for free.
Along with swimming pools, the data include incidents involving thousands of other consumer products – from air conditioners to vacuum cleaners. Many of your readers, viewers or listeners might not realize how dangerous swimming can be. Of the more than 44,000 deaths included in CPSC data running from January 1990 to October 2001, more than 5,300 records cited swimming pools as the main product involved with the death.
Other oft-cited products include bathtubs and showers and stairs and steps. Swimming deaths increase when slides and other related products are taken into account. The death database is just one of four CPSC provides. Also available are the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), Injury/Potential Injury Incident File (IPII), and In-depth Investigations (INDP). Like the death data, the narrative fields are one of the best features of these three datasets.
Additionally, the IPII and INDP tables include the city and state where the incident occurred. The incident and NEISS tables can be linked with the investigation table through a unique identifier known as the task number. When dealing with the age fields, keep in mind that CPSC uses a three-digit convention for children under the age of 2. For example, a child that is 23 months old is listed in the data as "223." Each of the four databases includes multiple product fields.
These fields just tell which products were involved with the injury or death.