J. Lee Annest, Director of Statistics and Programming at the CDC, reports that WISQARS has now been updated with 2005 mortality data from NCHS' National Vital Statistics System and is now available on the internet.   http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars

Lois Fingerhut, Special Assistant for Injury Epidemiology and Chair of the International Collaborative Effort on Injury Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, reports a new feature in CDC's WONDER that may be of importance for those interested in injury mortality data and how rates compare with other causes of death. To use this new system, 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. Lee Annest reports that the wonderful WONDER team will soon be adding the ICD-9 version.

What this allows one 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 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. In addition, HELP screens are available throughout the section.