OBJECTIVE To summarize house fire injury risk factor data, using relative risk estimation as a uniform method of comparison. METHODS Residential fire risk factor studies were identified as follows: MEDLINE (1983 to March 1997) was searched using the keywords fire*/burn*, with etiology/cause*, prevention, epidemiology, and smoke detector* or alarm*. ERIC (1966 to March 1997) and PSYCLIT (1974 ...

The services provided by any particular house clearly depend upon a great variety of physical characteristics of the house and its grounds. Possibly the most important of these characteristics are the size of the house, how that size is divided up for use, and the amount of land that is included with the house. Other features of the structure which presumably are important are the heating, elec...

At their worst, fires at the rural–urban or wildland–urban interface cause tragic loss of human lives and homes, but mitigating these fire effects through management elicits many social and scientific challenges. This paper addresses four interconnected management challenges posed by socially disastrous landscape fires. The issues concern various assets (particularly houses, human life and biod...

Most diets for rearing fire ants and other ants contain insects such as crickets or mealworms. Unfortunately, insect diets are expensive, especially for large rearing operations, and are not always easily available or uniformly effective. This study was designed to examine colony growth of Solenopsis (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) fire ants fed beef liver. Five experiments were performed: four with ...

BACKGROUND We sought to define the factors associated with house fires and related injuries by analyzing the data from population-based surveillance. METHODS For 1991 through 1997, we linked the following data for Dallas: records from the fire department of all house fires (excluding fires in apartments and mobile homes), records of patients transported by ambulance, hospital admissions, and ...

In most industrialised countries, the majority of fire-related deaths and injuries occur in the home. Australia has implemented fire prevention programs and strategies, including the use of smoke alarms, to minimise this burden. The number of reported house fires has declined over the past decade. However, there is a growing recognition that unreported fires are important in the estimation of t...

A fire experiment conducted in a British 1950s-style house is described. Measurements of temperature, smoke, CO, CO2 , and O2 were taken in the Lounge, stairwell, and front and back bedrooms. The front bedroom door was wedged open, while the door to the back bedroom was wedged closed. Contrary to expectations and despite the relatively small fire load, analysis and hazard calculations show perm...

In 1985, fire and/or burn injuries killed 1461 children aged 0 to 19 years in the United States; an estimated 23,638 children were hospitalized and 440,000 were treated for burns. More than 101,000 life years were lost. A "cost of burn injury" model suggests a dollar value of societal losses from childhood burn deaths and injuries at approximately $3.5 billion. Very young children (0 to 4 years...