National Fire Prevention Week -- October 6-12, 1996
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has designated
October
6-12, 1996, as National Fire Prevention Week. The theme for the
week is
"Let's Hear it For Fire Safety! Test Your Detectors."
The United States has the highest annual death rate from fires
of all
developed countries (2.1 per 100,000 persons). This problem
disproportionately affects the southeastern states, particularly
during
December-February, when the number of residential fire-related
deaths and
injuries is 1.5-3.3 times that of summer months. Widespread use of
noncentral home heating sources (e.g., wood-burning stoves and
portable
space heaters) are major causes because they often are improperly
placed
and/or left unattended.
A substantial proportion of the injuries and deaths result from
poor
basic fire-safety practices. A study by the U.S. Consumer Product
Safety
Commission during January 1995 indicated that most homes in which a
fire
occurs are not equipped with a functioning smoke detector (1).
NFPA recommends that every home in the United States be
equipped with
one functioning smoke detector in each bedroom area and on every
habitable
floor of the residence to protect the home and its residents from
fires. In
addition, NFPA recommends timing smoke detector battery replacement
with
the October clock change from daylight savings time to standard
time
through the "Change Your Clock, Change Your Battery" slogan.
One of the national health objectives for the year 2000 is to
increase
the presence of functional smoke detectors to at least one on each
habitable floor of all inhabited residential dwellings (objective
9.17)
(2). Additional information about residential fires is available
from CDC's
Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention, National Center for
Injury
Prevention and Control, telephone (770) 488-4652.
References
US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Fire incidence study:
National
Smoke Detector Project. Washington, DC: US Consumer Product
Safety
Commission, January 1995.
Public Health Service. Healthy people 2000: national health
promotion
and disease prevention objectives -- full report, with
commentary.
Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services,
Public
Health Service, 1991; DHHS publication no. (PHS)91-50212.
Disclaimer
All MMWR HTML versions of articles are electronic conversions from ASCII text into HTML. This conversion may have resulted in character translation or format errors in the HTML version. Users should not rely on this HTML document, but are referred to the electronic PDF version and/or the original MMWR paper copy for the official text, figures, and tables. An original paper copy of this issue can be obtained from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), Washington, DC 20402-9371; telephone: (202) 512-1800. Contact GPO for current prices.
**Questions or messages regarding errors in formatting should be addressed to mmwrq@cdc.gov.
