The United Kingdom has the ninth lowest death rate from fire out of 24 industrialised nations at 7.6 deaths per million population, a new report from the US Fire Administration has revealed.
Fire Death Trends: An international Perspective also finds that the United States has improved significantly on its historically poor record on fire deaths. It now has the tenth highest death rate out of the 24 countries, at 12.4 fire deaths per million population, compared to 34.4 per million in 1979.
In spite of this, the US still has a rate at least double that of eight of the other nations included: Switzerland, Singapore, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Spain, and Germany. The US death rate is six times that of Switzerland (2.0 per million), the nation with the lowest rate among those surveyed.
The report suggests the wide variations in death rates could be due to differences in lifestyle, cultural attitudes towards fire, fire prevention practices and education, and building practices and regulations.
“Historically, the fire death rate in the United States has been higher than most of the industrialised world,” says the report.
“The causes of the United States prominent standing in this area are not entirely clear and have been the subject of debate for some time. To compound the issue, the United States is comparatively safety conscious and one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world. To have such high fire death rates is perplexing for a country that ranks so highly in those two areas.”
The report also notes that the US had the largest reduction in its fire death rate between 1979 and 2007, and is only among six countries for which data was available during the period to halve its death rate, the others being the United Kingdom (which had the second biggest reduction), Austria, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
Fire Death Trends: An international Perspective
