Prevention of burn injuries

Anna Arno1, 2, Judy Knighton1

1Ross Tilley Burn Centre, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

2Burn unit and Plastic Surgery Department, Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Introduction

Burns prevalence and relevance

Prevention means anticipation. In modern medicine, prevention has become the goal of all healing strategies. It has been shown that prevention is key for maintaining health and having the highest quality of life, despite increasing age. Furthermore, prevention is the more efficient way to treat an illness, since it reduces, not only hospital stay, but also drug use and cost of complications. However, prevention can also be expensive and it has until recently been considered a luxury and sometimes impractical, especially in the developing world.

Like other injury mechanisms, the prevention of burns requires epidemiology and risk factors studies. In fact, the complete care of any illness or injury implies epidemiology (measurement of risk factors, frequency and distribution of the injury), prevention, injury biomechanics (physical and functional responses of the victim to the energy), treatment and rehabilitation.

Although burns represent a small number of all traumatic injuries, they are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality worldwide, leading to chronic devastating sequelae, not only physical, but also psychological and social. As a result, burn prevention is particularly important and should be a major focus of attention.

To measure the frequency and risk of a disease, epidemiologists, health care providers, government agencies and insurers calculate the prevalence and incidence of a disease, respectively. Whereas the prevalence is the total number of cases of a disease in a population at a given time, the incidence is the number of new cases in that population in a given time period.

A burn injury represents one of the most severe forms of trauma, and occurs in more than two to three million people in North America each year. In the United States, an estimated 500,000 people seek medical attention for burn injury per year, but burns incidence and severity is decreasing recently. However, the exact incidence of burns differs between countries; the reported is 31.2 per 100,000 persons/ year referred to a specialized unit for definitive treatment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 330,000 deaths per year worldwide are related to thermal injury, and most of them are due to fire-related burns. More than 90% of these fatal, fire-related burns occur in the developing world, in particular South-East Asia (Table 1). On average in the United States in 2003, a fire death occurred about every 2 hours and someone was injured every 29 minutes. At present, burns are the fourth leading cause of death from unintentional injury. A severe burn represents a devastating injury,

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Marc G. Jeschke et al. (eds.), Handbook of Burns

© Springer-Verlag/Wien 2012