WISQARS™ Fatal Injury Mapping Help Menu

1. Fatal Injury Mapping – Overview

WISQARS^TM Fatal Injury Mapping provides national, regional, and state maps showing statewide and county-level annualized injury death rates. To accomplish this, WISQARS^TM uses annual mortality data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics.¹ For more information about this mortality data, see the section Data Sources.

You can request a map by:

• all injury (all types of injuries) or traumatic brain injury (TBI) only,
• intent (manner) of injury,
• mechanism (cause) of injury,
• geographic coverage (national, multi-state census region, or individual state),
• years of report,
• race,
• Hispanic origin,
• sex, and
• age (all ages, fixed 5-year age groups alone or in combination, and custom age ranges).

You can request maps that show:

• crude death rates or
• age-adjusted death rates.

Maps of individual states always show individual counties. For national or regional maps, however, you can switch between two different levels of geographic detail:

• state or
• county.

In maps that show county-level geographic detail you can also request that geospatial smoothing be applied (which can sometimes help clarify geographic patterns in the rates). The available options are:

• no smoothing or
• smoothing.

Other mapping options include:

• the number of rate intervals (number of different colors to use for mapping rates), and
• several choices of color scheme.

While viewing any map, there are also options that allow you to:

• save the map image,
• export the map data, and
• generate a printable view combining the map and the query screen.

WISQARS^TM Fatal Injury Mapping