For those of you interested in injury mortality data and how rates compare with other causes of death, I am really pleased to tell you about a new feature in CDC's WONDER.

If you go to http://wonder.cdc.gov/  and click on Mortality- underlying cause of death and then choose Mortality for 1999 - 2004 with ICD 10 codes you will be taken to what appears at first to be the traditional mortality pages for WONDER…but if you scroll down you will find a brand new Section 5 that will allow you to select injury categories either by intent or by mechanism (or both) according to the external cause of injury matrix for ICD-10 (we will soon be working with the wonderful WONDER team to add the ICD-9 version).

What this allows you to do is not only compare injury deaths and rates by mechanism and/or intent categories with each other but also among other categories in the 113 standard cause of death list. For example, comparisons can readily be made between motor vehicle traffic deaths, poisoning deaths, cancer deaths and heart disease deaths. This is a tremendous asset to those of us in the injury epidemiology field who have not had this simple interactive tool before. Both the mechanism and the intent groupings are in Section 1- Organize table layout. You will notice that all of the non-injury categories are listed in the category of Injury mechanisms and all other leading causes to allow the user to select what comparisons are wanted. Likewise, all non-injuries are combined into one group in the Intent category. HELP screens are available throughout the section.

Most importantly, none of the original capabilities of the underlying cause of death part of WONDER have been lost--this is an add-on feature.
 
Lois Fingerhut, MA; Special Assistant for Injury Epidemiology
Chair, International Collaborative Effort on Injury Statistics
National Center for Health Statistics