In response to:
>No one reports or tracks this
>factoid, but the near 100% digitization of emergency room records >makes
this a pretty easy thing to "go count", as the data on stingers >would not
seem to be confidential HIPPA restricted data.
I just thought I would weigh in here and say that I had to laugh out loud
when I read "pretty easy thing". I'll just say that hospital medical
records in he US were never created to be searchable or to create
aggregated medical record data for analysis. Even worse, some hospitals (in
the digital age) have entirely different ER and primary care medical record
systems. And even worse, hospitals can have to pay fees to access their own
data (eg it used to be $30k/yr for hospitals to license the data access
module for Epic's EHR data).
To get constructive though, your best bet would be to look through the
ambulatory data:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/ahcd.htm
or mortality data:
http://wonder.cdc.gov/
to find the accident/death data relating to bee stings.
The best data here in the US is the hospital billing data which typically
uses ICD codes or bundles of them. Also, one of changes that should show up
when the US transitions from ICD-9 to ICD-10 this year is that instead of
having one category for insect stings (
http://www.icd9data.com/2015/Volume1/800-999/980-989/989/989.5.htm ), we
will much more detailed data about bee stings, and can even separate the
masochists (self inflicted bee stings) from the innocent (accidental bee
stings) (http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/S00-T88/T51-T65/T63/T63.4-)
. Although I admit that I am confused by "T63.443
<http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/S00-T88/T51-T65/T63/T63.4-/T63.443>
Toxic
effect of venom of bees, assault". Is that assault with venomous bees?
For more information on medical record data, you might find this helpful
and amusing:
http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/the-16-most-absurd-icd-10-codes/285737/
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